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Researchers Looking at Alternatives to Palladium
An anonymous reader writes "Some folks at Stanford have been looking at an alternative architecture for doing trusted computing (ala Palladium) based on using Virtual Machines. They presented a brief paper describing their work a couple weeks ago at the USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems . In their paper they also discuss a bunch of non-DRM applications of Trusted Computing such as distributed firewalls, improving P2P security, preventing DDOS, and even strengthening civil liberty protections."
How can DRM "protect rights" when it denies basic rights of fair use?
Ah, but there's the rub. It's not about protecting YOUR rights, it's about protecting the rights of the big corporations. Well not so much their rights as the "rights" they want - i.e. control over your computer and everything you use it for.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
it doesn't really matter how hard it is, so long as one single person can crack it.
Every palladium-disabled machine out there will have a different key. Getting the key out of one won't help you get the key out of another.
Really, I can't say I've read too much about how it works, but likely it'll have MS/Intel's _public_ key stored so that it can check the certificates of code that you try to run to make sure that it's trusted.
Yeah, they will have those public keys in there, but every machine will also have a private key of its own embedded in hardware. That's how palladium aims to prevent you from copying your data from one computer to another. The "protected" data will be encrypted based on a key that is unique to you, making the encrypted data useless to anyone else.