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A Critical Look at Trusted Computing
mod12 writes "After just attending a two-week summer program on the theoretical foundations of security (one of the speakers was from Microsoft research), I have been interested in trying to find out if the "trusted computing" initiative was still alive. I got my answer today in the New York Times from an article that was fortunately rather critical of the concept."
Does anyone know of companies planning on building processors without DRM? In a competitive marketplace there would not be DRM because consumers don't demand it and surely would prefer computers that aren't controlled by the market after the sale. But with only two major PC processor manufacturers having a duopoly over the market it isn't very competitive.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
COME ON! please, why do they make such claims?! or why do journalists make such claims? i think the establishment/private companies/whatever has been proved wrong on that issue over and over and OVER again. if there's someone who actually thinks their data is totally secure these days . . .
another point: this initiative could be very dangerous. buying OS's with this crap already on them, limiting what you can do . .. so, what, should we stock up on Win2000, XP, and Linux OS's along with our CD and DVD burners?
DRM may stop the morons, but soon enough, once a few "l33ts" circumvent it and it gets released into the wild, what's the point.
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we all deal with 'trusted computing' to some extent or other. in any computer system there is a person/persons/entity that is trusted. in the simplest form it is supervisor/admin/etc. as you design a network you describe who is trusted.
when you get a commercial digital certificate you are expressing trust.
in a well designed (large) system you would build in multiple trusts to act as a check and balance. sort of an auditing feature. novell is real big on this.
i find it interesting that the ms model of trust is pretty much putting all your eggs in what is mostly their basket. no auditing, no accountability, etc.
i suspect that we will see more distributed trust as companies and isps become more involved in this.
eric
definition depends on who you ask.
it originally meant protecting user keys via a secured tcpa chip (not drm). then microsoft started their trustworthy campaign and included palladium's announcement and that somehow changed the definition to include drm. so please, keep that in mind. palladium and tcpa are not the same thing.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
If the Wintel crowd were serious about security, they'd push for a hardware architecture that supports secure microkernels really well and put a very partitioned OS on top of it. But no; it's all about boot-time lock in.
I just wish people would remember all the _good_ parts of trusted computing. So far as the TCPA goes, DRM isn't even a part of it. It's just a standard hardware interface for encryption and key storage. Whether that's used to sign OS's, implement DRM, or simply secure Apache, is up to the OS. Yes, it _can_ be used for all that. But hell, a BIOS _now_ can be set to only boot an OS with a certain fingerprint - how the technology is used is independent from the technology itself. TCPA is a (possibly) good thing. Palladium/DRM, that's the real evil (from the consumer and OSS viewpoints, anyways).
Industry leaders also contend that none of this will stifle innovation.
What the Industry Leaders mean is that the Industry Leaders will not be stifled. The rest of the industry should just not worry their little heads. It will all be done for us by those who know best.
The biggest argument made against Lindows was that people who bought the system would be turned off once they got it home and realized it wouldn't let them do what they expected. In this case, running MS Office, games, etc. As a result, Lindows has since abandoned much of their early claims about MS-compatibility.
What happens when a someone gets one of these new Trusted systems home and realizes that they can't use it as expected? What happens when it doesn't let them them burn audio CD's or play previous burned songs on CD-R/W's? What happens when they have trouble just opening word processing or spreadsheet files, because they are not considered "trusted"? Even email could become a problem.
I see this whole "Trusted" initiative by Microsoft as a potential boon to open source software developers and even "white box" computer manufacturers.
Word will get out: "Don't buy any of the new Hewlett-Packards with that new Windows. They just don't work!" Microsoft has already turned many corporations against them with the new License 6.0 scheme. "Trusted" computing could turn many home users against Microsoft and all of the hardware manufacturers who have thrown their lot in with them.
Large corporations have historically always got what they wanted, unless of course the government had steped in. I'm no longer so concerned if this technology will be implemented. I am now concerned about HOW the computing community will deal with it. Gates already said he doesn't plan on deploying trusted computing technologies immediately. Why wouldn't he want to deploy this technology that can supposedly stop all forms of piracy? People will not buy computers that do not do what they ask. MS will wait until their TC enabled OS is prevailent on most PCs, and then send a signal from Redmond enabling it. There will be no way out. People will have to learn to live with it. After all they paid hundreds of dollars for their PC, right? You can't stop progress, but you can try. UltraSkuzzi The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. -- Winston Churchill
~UltraSkuzzi
This comment is liscensed by SCO.
I believe "Reliable and Secure" computing is what people want for home computers. The term "Trusted" computing is usually saved for military computers, etc, that are following the Rainbow books' criteria. Also for systems trying to get a Common Criteria rating. "Trusted" computing includes two-man controls, the kind that prevent one person from launching a bunch of nuclear missiles. The NYtimes version of trusted computing means computers that the RIAA and MPAA can trust not to let you download their stuff. It might even include letting the RIAA and MPAA destroy your computer if you do (based on what some senators want to pass as law)
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
The National Security Agency's "security-enhanced" Linux is an attempt to make Linux into a "trusted" computing platform, but that has NOTHING to do with DRM and other MPAA- and RIAA-borne stupidity.
Security researchers are putting a lot of effort into defining trust relationships and developing guidelines for applying the term "trusted" to software. Has the software design been verified? How about the code? Who verified the design and audited the code? Have there been security problems in the past? Is the concept fundamentally compatible with security?
Then along come the MPAA and RIAA, and they convince Microsoft (among others) to start talking about a totally fucking DIFFERENT definition of "trusted". Whereas the OLD definition of "trusted" involved concepts like integrity, secrecy, reliability, and auditability, the NEW meaning of "trusted" is essentially "crippled".
As somebody who studies security for a living, it irritates me to see the two concepts confused. Microsoft's DRM-enabled operating systems will NOT include the features I've outlined above, and a highly "trusted" operating system could very well include software that allows you to "rip, mix, and burn" just as people are accustomed to doing today.
Really, just who is "trusting" the DRM operating systems? Not the users-- I imagine there will be just as many viruses and exploits and bugs as before. Not software developers-- Microsoft hasn't really announced any plans to do things like, say, encrypt the swap space or integrate stack protection into their linkers, loaders, and compilers.
In fact, the only people who are really trusting the DRM operating systems are the content industry associations. Which makes sense, as Microsoft and company are essentially doing the whole "trusted computing" thing at the behest of the MPAA's congressional whore.
Please, folks, let's call a spade a spade: the DRM-enabled operating systems are NOT "trusted". They're "content-industry-friendly". They're "crippled". They're a lot of things, but they're not "trusted".
Let's start asking for some precision of language, here.
The very things that computer users want to be protected from--viruses and the tons of spam messages--are not addressed with these "improvements".
As eloquently outlined in the Times article: the new encrypted computing world, even the most mundane word-processing document or e-mail message would be accompanied by a software security guard controlling who can view it, where it can be sent and even when it will be erased. Also, the secure PC is specifically intended to protect digital movies and music from online piracy. But while beneficial to the entertainment industry and corporate operations, the new systems will not necessarily be immune to computer viruses or unwanted spam e-mail messages, the two most severe irritants to PC users. "Microsoft's use of the term `trusted computing' is a great piece of doublespeak," said Dan Sokol, a computer engineer based in San Jose, Calif., who was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computing Club, the pioneering PC group. "What they're really saying is, `We don't trust you, the user of this computer.' "
In "trusted computing" the public gets no security; the FAT entertainment industry gets fatter; and the common man is unduly scrutinized.
Let's hope our everyday "Joe Consumer" rebels. If Intel comes out with a chip with this trusted-Big-Brother component, I hope the American consumer leaves it rotting on the shelves.
Money talks, b.s. walks. If the public refuses to buy this garbage which is hyped to protect them, perhaps the companies will look at this trusted computing issue again and drop it in the trash can it belongs.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
OTOH it looks like this stuff will only effect Intel and MS products. Personally, I have always used Apple products myself. It has protected me from MS viral licenses. It has protected me from Intel's occasional desire to track all users. It is now protecting me from silly DRM schemes that do nothing but protect antique business models. Apple has done more for security by allowing the user to turn off HTML in mail.app that MS could possibly hope to do in a decade.
The same could be said for GNU/Linux and other non-MS users. For these users there are only three concerns. First, laws could be passed to require certain attributes in entire classes of software. For example, as the article suggests, all email and music might have to be signed with a CPU generated hash. Of course all advanced users know that such technology could be circumvented, and, even with laws against circumvention, such actions will routinely occur.
Second, the makers of Intel clone chips might, and probably will, succumb to pressure and include security features. This would be bad because right now OSS is very tied to Intel class chips. The solution to this is to build open hardware platforms around non-Intel class chips, and create OSS projects that run on such platforms. Intel may be a slave to MS, but AMD and others might be more scared of lost sales due to OSS moving to Motorola and IBM chipsets. In five years if OSS is still tied to the Intel instruction set, and Intel is only making chips that spy on the user, there will be no one to blame.
The third issue comes from a quote in the article
the system will also require a new generation of computer hardware, not only replacing the computer logic board but also peripherals like mice, keyboards and video cards
from this we can infer that MS intends to push DRM to all hardware connected to the CPU, which, of course, is the logical course of action. The issue is as above. OSS runs mostly on what is essentially MS hardware. If all MS hardware requires software that is cryptographically signed and externally validated, probably by MS related service, one wonders if OSS will exist. If OSS does exist, one wonders if it would have any purpose the user was still ultimately tied to MS licenses and security schemes.
This has always been the danger of the single environment ecosystem. The OSS people seem to forget how inherently dependent on MS whims they are. One wonders if some diversification might be in order.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
...what you think.
Face it, the software market is pretty much saturated from their perspective, and there isn't much room for growth on the desktop compared with previous years.
What MS discovered, about two years ago, was that they could sell a completely different product. What MS discovered was Radio.
Radio doesn't make money by playing songs. Radio makes money by selling its listeners. Now, take a re-think of the Trusted Platform from that perspective, and what it's purpose will be completely obvious.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
With most of the world's electronics manufacturing business in China anyway, I guess this means we'll all be running Linux on Chinese developed and manufactured hardware in a few years, while Microsoft, Intel and AMD all sit around in the wreckage of their once profitable empires wondering what went wrong.
Here's a hint guys: You forgot what made the PC platform great in the first place: Freedom.
Call it freedom to innovate, freedom to fsck up a computer beyond repair, freedom to write a virus or freedom to swap files. Whatever. But try taking our freedom away and you will face the consequences.
Now that would be a deliciuos irony, wouldn't it. America and the West taking away the freedom of all computer users, and the Chinese coming to the rescue and restoring our freedom.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
From the article:
Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, told a technology conference in Washington on Wednesday. "This technology can make our country more secure and prevent the nightmare vision of George Orwell at the same time."
Yes Bill that's right. You can usher in the technology that may bring about Orwell's vision and at the same time help it slide through by simply claiming the exact opposite from the other side of your mouth.
Dyuh... It's somehow related to the truth, perhaps that means I should believe it.