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Using Palladium to Secure P2P Networks
user555 writes "The RIAA and MPAA have seen Palladium as a way to prevent piracy. But this article argues that ironically Palladium may actually make P2P piracy more widespread (PDF). They argue that the security features of Palladium could be used to create P2P networks that are more resistant to attacks from content owners."
Microsoft might just hobble Windows ulnder palladium, so that it can't do certain things without RIAA/MPAA aproval.
This would be another win for Linux.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
"Palladium may actually make... piracy more widespread."
Yeah, piracy of Windows XP when no one wants to buy Windows Palladium Edition. It astounds me that the population in general is so ignorant and apathetic toward the loss of their rights.
barzelay.net
First of all, it suggests that P2P networks are by nature about piracy. I am a huge fan of BitTorrent and have used it for nothing other than downloading cool movie trailers. While piracy has always been common online, you can't blame the cables for the content.
The second issue I take with this submission is the phrase "more resistant to attacks from content owners." I assume you're talking about the RIAA because security from artists who want to be paid for their work is not something most people ever want. Sure, cut the thieves in the RIAA out of the equation but few people will ever begrudge the artists their $1 or $2 per album. It's the oligarchy that is the RIAA that people are mad at.
It could kick ass for servers. I could sign all the binaries my system runs using a secondary (unnetworked) system and then so long as i control all the keys then it becomes very difficult for someone to install backdoors, rootkits, and viruses.
I'm quite psyched about the control it provides. Sadly most of the public are probably too ignorant to even want that control.
In order for software to be 'trusted', Microsoft has to sign it (that's what Palladium is all about. Microsoft has a monopoly over what is or is not trusted). Microsoft is not going to sign software unless it serves Microsoft's agenda. If p2p software hampers Microsoft's plans to monopolize the online media distribution channel, they will either demand the software be crippled before they sign it, or simply refuse to sign it at all.
As the article in many more words states, It is not simple for DRM enabled sytems like Palladium to differentiate between whats actually illegal or not.
They require that the software that will interact with the DRM features actually be 'trusted'. Unless they want all software written for Palladium to be 'MPAA/RIAA' approved, anyone can write 'untrustful' code. Only one link in the chain has to be broken for it to fail completely.
So, write 'trusted' p2p file sharing.
I am afraid that someone like MS will require you to pay in the future to have the right to write 'trusted' code, or any code won't run at all.
Teamwork is a bunch of people doing what I tell them.
Schechter, Greenstadt and Smith write that "to thward piracy the entertainment industry must keep distribution costs high, reduce the size of distribution networks and raise the cost of extracting content". While that may be a true statement, it is as useful as Saddam Hussein's military advisors recommending that Iraqui aviation enginners be sent to major American defense contractors to increase fuel consumption of US bombers and reduce the accuracy of their communication systems.
Since the entertainment industry does not own fiber, switches, PCs, or consumer CD burners they must take Schechter's advice and invert it to suit the networks that they do own.
I'll restate their conclusion as follows:
To thward piracy the entertainment industry must keep distribution costs low> , reducing the total cost for consumers to acquire legitimate content. When it takes less total effort (purchase price + effort) to acquire legitimate media the users will abandon piracy. This approach has been clearly demonstrated with Apple's iTunes product.
Like I've argued before, no technology can be considered entirely good or entirely evil. Only the way it is used can be.
There's a technology out there that, in the US alone, costs people trillions of dollars a year from damage to property, and kills hundreds of thousands of people yearly - against, just in the US. Should such a technology be banned?
If so, then let's head back to the Stone Age, because you just outlawed fire! Sure, it can be used to kill people, but it can also be used for numerous good deeds.
So it is with even Palladium. Will it be used for evil deeds? Almost certainly. Does that make it evil in and of itself? Of course not.
I mod down anyone who uses M$ in their posts. I like to live on the edge.
In a previous article (with quotes from ron rivest?), it was pointed out that the question is whether or not people will be able to control the signed code that runs on their machines.
If you need an official MS signature on the code, things like p2p networks probably aren't going to fly.
Unfortunately, the knee-jerk "MS is the devil" reaction hurts everyone. Technology that allows other people to trust information coming out of your machine is useful. This paper describes a good example of an application for that technology.
The problem is going to be in the details -- specifically, as rivest (I think) pointed out, whether or not you need an MS signature to load the code on your machine.
Instead of saying "palladium is evil", we should be pushing for comparatively open implementations. Any system that runs trusted code on my machine ought to be under my control and transparent. I ought to be able to decide what I want to run, and how that code will communicate with the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, that's not going to happen, because everyone is taking a simplistic view of the issue. No one is engaging MS seriously on this, and because of that they're going to deploy a system that's not under user control, and that's not transparent.
Actually, I personally interpreted it as a story not to stem the ill-will, but rather generate ill-will in the opposing camp.
Basically it's a counter 'warning' saying "P2P's can work your technology against your own intent".
Certainly I don't see it as an attempt to pacify the anti-Palladium camp.
You can already do this with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. There is a security policy that allows you to prevent the system from running any binaries that you didn't sign.
The downside is that you also need to individually sign the patches too, and that can be time consuming.
Agreed. I wasn't citing the practicality of the idea, rather, the intent.
I'm wondering what the hardware manufacturers are going to do - will they continue to offer 'normal' products like they do now ( HDD's, MB's ) without such devices built in - or, will they be forced to only make protected devices?
Personally, I don't see their being sufficient market forces to push HDD and MB makers into dropping the 'insecure' hardware entirely.
I hope not. It is well known that the fundamental problem with P2P systems is the inability to trust the client. What does palladium offer? - an ability to trust the client. duh
Surely even Microsoft could have put the 2 together - this would not be news to them, or anyone else really (except journos).
I.O.U One Sig.
a world in progress...
I don't see the market forces, either. I think the industries' hopes are tied to legislation. Another possibility is that content will be so cheap that it's nearly free when these machines are first produced, until general purpose computers are driven out of the market, then prices increased once that happens.
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Unauthorized copying (sometimes called piracy) is not the real threat against the __AA, but it is the easiest to defend. What they really fear is the ability of independents from creating and distributing their own content without their aid. They want to eventually force all technologies to only play content that was blessed by one of their sacred keys. Think about the CSS keys in DVDs...I am unable to produce a DVD containing my own content which is protected by CSS because I don't have access to one of the magic keys. But is my content which I own a copyright on any less deserving of full copyright protection under the law? Well, certainly the DMCA doesn't protect my content because I've been locked out of even using the popular circumvention technologies.
Well, Palladium and the like are the step towards eroding my rights as an independent creator even further. At least with DVDs, I could given enough capitalistic force create my own alternative to CSS with which I could protect my own content. But with an enforced technology, I don't even have that option open to me. Content creators will be forced to publish only through the evil media oligopoly.
BTW, on an unrelated crypto subject. What about an idea of taking advantage of what is traditionally viewed as fair rights. Say it's okay to just extract 3 seconds of media. I can then publish on a P2P network an article which includes an except of seconds 7.2 through 9.8 of a song. If enough different (and independenly-acting) people publish fair-use derived content with different 3-second extracts, one could in theory reproduce the entire original. There are also crypto techniques such as secret splitting, but the simple 3-second method may be more defendable in the interests of expression of fair rights as long as there is no collusion among individuals. Just a thought, not that I condone unauthorized copying.
Last time I checked, the RIAA was not a Law Enforcement Agency.
This is a scary thought... but have you actually looked at the slashdot concensus track record... it's a hell of alot better than any technical analyst I know of. Slashdot usually jumps to the most cynical conclusion about technology that even hints at restricting your rights... and they are usually right.
"Oh, Mommy, look, it's Shiny Video Game. Can we buy it?"
"No, darling, it says it only runs on Palladium, and we still run XP."
"But MOMMY, I WANT SHINY VIDEO GAME!"
Total cost of that trip to Best Buy?
People will buy whatever is being sold to them. They deserve it all, especially since they'll be trampling us on the way.John
... how would you get the P2P application ON palladium? I thought one of the big ideas behind it was that it would only run trusted code. Why would MS let a P2P app into the pen?
Question though... what's to keep MS from trusting a piece of software that I don't? ex. Bonzi Buddy, Xupiter, Save Now...
It just so happens that I don't trust those apps. I don't really care for anyone to tell my computer that I trust these programs. Because I really don't.
But legally, can Microsoft only trust who they want? Wouldn't they have to trust almost everyone? Can they legally say "We're not going to sign your programs as trusted" to anyone? Wouldn't that be anticompetitive, almost?
It isn't okay to run spyware/adware/malware on my system.
Is is okay to run programs that I have written myself.
So why has MS done the exact reverse of this!?
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
It's a research paper. For school. It's not journalism, not a "cleverly planted story," it's a bloody academic essay. It is sitting in a student's directory on a Harvard server. The only "planting" I see is the link Slashdot provided to it in the first place.
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The obvious flaw here is that the RIAA can take legal action against certification athorities for facililitating the sharing of copyrighted materials. If networks respond by allowing anyone to become a certification athority, then this opens the loop hole of trust all over again. Furthermore, the whole idea of trusted computing (as outlined in this paper) is fundamentally flawed, because you could still have a virtual machine from the BIOS on up, and who's the wiser?
There is a huge difference between this and what a Palladium based system could potentially do. Software Restriction Policies in XP and Win2003 are not bulletproof. They can protect users from accidentally running a trojan/virus but they cannot guarantee that somebody hasn't modified the OS itself.
This is a fundamental problem with traditional (non-Palladium based) systems. OS can give you some protection but to guarantee the integrity of the OS itself you need some kind of hardware support.
Using Palladium to secure P2P would be a nice idea if, and only if, anybody could create applications that took advantage of the Palladium chipset. MS gives everyone the impression that this will be possible by saying things like "everyone will benefit from this technology", but the truth is that Palladium will be very protected by heavy, restrictive licencing. That's pretty much guaranteed.
After all, this is one of the most important parts of the plan. You have to pay to write apps that use it, and this will hurt the only competition MS has: software that doesn't cost any money.
Does anyone think they'll really allow a P2P network to tap into its secure computing resources? I don't think so. They'll be really careful about who they license it to, no matter how much money's involved, because once you get viruses, Bonzi Buddies and spyware that's so secure that removal programs can't get them, or if the users start using Palladium in a way the big labels can't intervene, they'll have a huge problem.
The whole idea is that if you don't buy into palladium then things (media, web services, etc.) that use palladium will not work with you system, AT ALL. It will not just magicaly kill all encrryption and run off on its merry way.
Excuse me, but isn't it already illegal to attack computers you don't own, even if you are the content owner? Nor, except for a few fake files, is it even happening?
So it will be harder to do something that already is illegal, and already isn't happening.
Boy, I just can't wait to upgrade my processor and OS to get all those benefits.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Excuse me, but doesn't Nullsoft's W.A.S.T.E. (see /. a couple days ago) already accomplish this without special handware -- and without Microsoft?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Unless they are hacked, and then they won't be allowed to run on a Pull-a-DRM machine.
Ever since DRM first reared its ugly head, I have been (hysterically, at times) hollering about how this is about 'content' control. Monopolizing the *abillity* to publish. (Subscribers can find many posts of mine dealing with that, amongst all the trolling I do ;)
P2P will NOT be 'secure' on a Pull-a-DRM. It will not work! Even if the Pull-a-DRM system is broken by 3 lines of script, those who use the 3 lines will be sued or charged under some **IA brokered law. Sharing will be *restricted* to what the **IAs allow through their 'special' keys.
Sure, copy, share, rip mix burn the newest crap as pushed on Clear Channel, but try and nab a homemade mix of some band you saw last night or a little video from your friend on vacation and it just won't work.
Maybe MS has got it all figured out - somehow Pull-a-DRM just *knows* that Billy's video email is ok, but somehow I doubt it. Remember, YOU DON'T GET TO DECIDE - you are NOT TRUSTED.
Everyone needs to realize that Pull-a-DRM will KILL what the net has done for independent musicians, filmmakers, artists, writers, and coders.
It will be a cancer, slowly spreading. Mom will get the new PC "MSN 10" with the 'Super-Security'(for the kids). Things won't run, she'll bitch, more crap will be made to work ONLY with DRM. Boil the frog. It's what's for dinner!
DRM is NOT YOUR FRIEND
Thgere is one thing that seems to be missing in the article. Even If Ross Anderson is on the acknoledgements they have eluded two quite clear points in the strategy of how the trust system works.
Keys are issued and can expire not only for content but also for software.
So lets imagine: I with a group of friends decide to implement a P2P system that runs on trustworthy platforms. Fine, we write the code, debug, test - several thousands of beers later - we want to release it. If we want to have it available for download and for it to run on all other computers a key has to be supplied. So we scratch our pockets and go see Bill and try to ge the software validated - Valdation mechanism is pricy yet simple for any normal vendor.
We are lucky, we say its not for file sharing but for officeware collaboration, only the amount of files at your disposal is kind of unlimited and there is no real restriction on who you connect to.
Ok we put it out to the mirrors and people and their grand-mas start using for P2P filesharing.
M$ can revoke the key at any time!!! So even if we get to that stage: We can't do anything if they hold the keys, and the music industry stands behind them.
I have read we should not consider TCPA evil. Well its the closest I was planning to get on this earth.
Where is my mind?