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."

Comments

Markoff!!!!!!

[sixdotoh]

yeah, and check out who wrote the article.

for those of you who don't know, Markoff is the journalist who wrote several articles about kevin mitnick in which he "created the myth of kevin mitnick" (in kevin's words). many untrue allegations were presented as supposed facts.

but don't let that discourage you from reading the article.

The meaning of trust

[dmeranda]

The word "trust" is pretty much the central idea in formal security. And ultimately is comes down to deciding if one person trusts another person. Of course when you mix in technologies, then that expands into trusting the system components. Do you trust the website is the correct one? Do you trust the CA registrar. Do you trust that the web browser isn't lying to you. Do you trust that your keyboard isn't recording all your keystrokes? Its all about trust, and no secure system can avoid the subject. And no formal security method can avoid it either.

So yes, trusted security is very much alive, or it had better be, or we won't have any security. But the big question is whom or what is being trusted? And the big media companies are trying their best to confuse the issue. It's just like their "secure media". Their concept of trust is that they, the media distributors, want to be able to trust your hardware to not trust you the consumer. They also want to also insure that other consumers will not trust you, or you could otherwise become your own media producer and distributor and compete with them. If DVD players only play content that is digitally signed by the cartel, then you are barred from competing because you can no longer produce your own content that other's hardware will trust. But on the other side I want to trust that my computer is not infected with a virus; I want to trust that my legally copied media is not corrupted by the media police. Trust is the just the tool.

Trusted computed could be a very good thing, but you absolutely must define what you mean by trust before you can begin any discussion or evaluation, or to say whether it it "bad" or "good". From a purely technical and formal perspective trusted computing is the next step forward. From a society's perspective the answer is not so easy.

Another way to force upgrades on us

[thelandp]

Even though computer PC hardware has been sufficient for most applications (other than games / video editing etc) for quite a few years now, Microsoft and Intel have been constantly trying to justify more upgrades of both hardware and software to the user. Now along comes this:

Beyond changing the appearance and control of Windows, 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

Like most new Windows features, I don't see anything in this that the consumer actually wants, I think it is just a way to force yet another upgrade on us.