Transmeta to Incorporate DRM in TM5800 Processor

smiff writes "Silicon Valley is reporting that Transmeta will embed 'security' features in its TM5800 Crusoe processor. 'Transmeta said its Crusoe processors...would be slightly altered to tackle security and address requirements for securing sensitive data and intellectual property.' With everyone looking out for security, why don't I feel all warm and fuzzy inside?"

Comments

In other [bbc] news

[oliverthered]

The RIAA and technology companies have aggreed a deal, that will be anounced in washington on wednesday.

Basicly the RIAA are going to stop lobying for imposed DRM and the tech companies are going to put DRM inplace.

BBC News Story

Just a bunch of X86 extensions!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you actually read what Transmeta is adding the talk about security like in SHA, DES and AES. The accelerate the ciphers and MAC calculations. They probably will have a hardware based random number generator. Which is a great thing in itself. Those will probably be the best chips for IPSec gateways and SSH servers. This does not in any way forces certain signed OS to be booted or anything like this.

They say DRM because it sells, but you can use it for signature checking your executables against troyaned versions (and you calculate the signatures when you install from a know, secure media), accelerating your encrypted FS, chat and web traffic. So if you install MS system you get an accelerated DRM PC. You install Linux/xBSD and get an accelerated privacy protected PC. I'd rather have this choice.

All they are doing

[mocm]

is adding DES hardware support, which can be used for all kinds of stuff, but doesn't mean that they built in TCPA (see also this article. I think the DES hardware can be very useful, especially for brute forcing keys ;).