AMI Introduces 'Trusted Computing' BIOS

Posted by michael on Thursday January 9, 2003 @07:46AM from the here-it-comes dept.

An anonymous reader writes "American Megatrends announced its 'trusted computing' Palladium BIOS on Jan 6. It seems that the encrypted BIOS' integrity will be verified by a special chip or flash ROM, and will in turn verify the 'authenticity, integrity and privacy' of the boot loader and the operating system. Does that mean such machines may refuse to boot any other non-'trusted' OS? After all, the list of supporting corporations include AMD, Intel, IBM, and HP, of whom we heard quite favourable statements about Linux (just for example -- *BSDs will be equally affected) so far."

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Re:Not this time around... by SN74S181 · 2003-01-09 09:48 · Score: 0, Flamebait

The point of Palladium is that you will not longer have "root" access to your own machine.

What a pitiful, poorly thought out metaphor.

You already don't have "root" access to your own machine, unless you can hand code assembly language and know the registers and other particulars of your particular architecture.

Have you done a walk-through of the machine code in your bios? And any bios extensions loaded at boot time from ROMs on expansion cards like your video hardware?

How about the embedded controller machine code in your hard drive?

If not, you don't have "root" access and you'd better get crackin'.