DRM in Real-Time and Embedded Systems

An anonymous reader writes "In this guest column at LinuxDevices.com, Victor Yodaiken speculates on the implications (and potential catastrophic consequences) of Digital Rights Management Passport (DRMP) technology to embedded, real-time, and mission critical computer systems. Quoting from the article: "When a technology gets pervasively embedded in microprocessors, computer boards, and software, it will alter the performance of power turbines, jet engines, medical instruments, cell phones and missile guidance systems. Unfortunately, DRMP technology is incompatible with security and with the kinds of reliability needed in safety critical or mission critical applications.""

Comments

Go ahead and Jump

[Wyatt Earp]

To some wild conclusions, the author of that piece linked does.

1. Most military gear does not use off the shelf CPUs. An example - F/A-18E/F - while SuperHornet uses armored Cat-6 cables and PowerPC chips, they are specially made hardened chips for military and commercial sat applications. F/B-22 uses 486s as does F-15E but they are special 486s that come out just for military applications. If you sell a part to the US military for a system, you must produce that system for 15 more years. Since the new F-15Es for the US/Israel/Korea are just delivering now, one can expect 486s without DRM for a while, since F-22 may be in it's current model production until 2011, expect 486s until 2026.

Parts for missiles and PDAs sold to the Military are under the same rules.

2. Medical equipment - Usually use embedded OSes and Dragonball, 486s, ARM or Mot 68000 series chips, not the latest and greatest from Intel/AMD. They sure won't be running Palladium. I found that arguement by the author to be, well stupid.

3 I had another point, but I've got to go to work, and I forgot it. Sorry.

Re:Go ahead and Jump

[Tiroth]

Many mil-spec parts are simply the commercially available part that has upgraded reliability and/or testing. That hardened CPU probably shares the same core as the commercial IC.

Mil-spec parts already cost several times the amount of their commercial brethren, because that guaranteed reliability costs money. If you force mil-spec (and industrial) parts to be designed from scratch, the cost will be at least an order of magnitude greater than that--separate R&D, separate fab process, etc. Making 1000 DRM-free ARM processors is unimaginably more expensive than making 1,000,000+.

No, these embedded processors don't currently support DRM. The author's (persuasive) argument, though, is that if DRM becomes the new paradigm for hardware and software licensing, there will eventually no longer be commercially viable computing devices that do not support it. The military, and those industries that can afford it, will go the custom-designed route in that case. However, DRM will add a high cost burden to those operations.