Slashdot Mirror
Big 3 Roll Out 'Trusted Mobile Platform'
An anonymous reader writes "In an effort to enhance the security of 'advanced' e-commerce services in mobile devices and guard against viruses and other software attacks, NTT DoCoMo, Intel, and IBM have jointly released a security specification known as the 'Trusted Mobile Platform.' The spec is said to define a set of hardware and software components that can be built into devices to provide varying degrees of security. Implementation of the platform is said to consist of applying well-established, strong security techniques to hardware and software architectures, resulting in a trusted execution environment that protects the device at boot time and during device operation. The hspec is available ere."
This isn't good for anybody
Old Seinfeld line..
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
13.9 months: Someone releases a trivial universal patch to bypass execution checks.
14 months: Big 3 release compatible S/W and H/W
14.01 months: Slashdot breaks news of patch which renders it useless.
14.1 months: CNN breaks the news.
14.2 months: Whoever releases the patch goes to jail for a long time while anyone who wants to do damage to your hardware anyway just patches their executable and releases.
24 months: Big companies announce another form of bulletproof security.
This is how you know someone is from Detroit: Ask them who the Big Three are and see if they say Ford, GM, and Chrysler. Honestly, I was very confused when I saw the headline. /Michigander
Bad Idea(TM)
Here's why:
"Trusted Computing" provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the application software, and where these applications can communicate securely with their authors and with each other. The original motivation was digital rights management (DRM): Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a TC platform, but which you won't be able to copy. The music industry will be able to sell you music downloads that you won't be able to swap. They will be able to sell you CDs that you'll only be able to play three times, or only on your birthday. All sorts of new marketing possibilities will open up.
TC will also make it much harder for you to run unlicensed software. In the first version of TC, pirate software could be detected and deleted remotely. Since then, Microsoft has sometimes denied that it intended TC to do this, but at WEIS 2003 a senior Microsoft manager refused to deny that fighting piracy was a goal: `Helping people to run stolen software just isn't our aim in life', he said. The mechanisms now proposed are more subtle, though. TC will protect application software registration mechanisms, so that unlicensed software will be locked out of the new ecology. Furthermore, TC apps will work better with other TC apps, so people will get less value from old non-TC apps (including pirate apps). Also, some TC apps may reject data from old apps whose serial numbers have been blacklisted. If Microsoft believes that your copy of Office is a pirate copy, and your local government moves to TC, then the documents you file with them may be unreadable. TC will also make it easier for people to rent software rather than buy it; and if you stop paying the rent, then not only does the software stop working but so may the files it created. So if you stop paying for upgrades to Media Player, you may lose access to all the songs you bought using it.
For years, Bill Gates has dreamed of finding a way to make the Chinese pay for software: TC looks like being the answer to his prayer.
There are many other possibilities. Governments will be able to arrange things so that all Word documents created on civil servants' PCs are `born classified' and can't be leaked electronically to journalists. Auction sites might insist that you use trusted proxy software for bidding, so that you can't bid tactically at the auction. Cheating at computer games could be made more difficult.
There are some gotchas too. For example, TC can support remote censorship. In its simplest form, applications may be designed to delete pirated music under remote control. For example, if a protected song is extracted from a hacked TC platform and made available on the web as an MP3 file, then TC-compliant media player software may detect it using a watermark, report it, and be instructed remotely to delete it (as well as all other material that came through that platform). This business model, called traitor tracing, has been researched extensively by Microsoft (and others). In general, digital objects created using TC systems remain under the control of their creators, rather than under the control of the person who owns the machine on which they happen to be stored (as at present). So someone who writes a paper that a court decides is defamatory can be compelled to censor it - and the software company that wrote the word processor could be ordered to do the deletion if she refuses. Given such possibilities, we can expect TC to be used to suppress everything from pornography to writings that criticise political leaders.
The gotcha for businesses is that your software suppliers can make it much harder for you to switch to their competitors' products. At a simple level, Word could encrypt all your documents using keys that only Microsoft products have access to; this would mean that you could only read them using Microsoft products, not with any competing word processor. Such blatant lock-in might be prohi
Not sure if I'm reading your point correctly here, but you seem to be suggesting that whatever security the big companies can come up with will be broken.
Let me assume that is the argument you're making. This is a common argument, and technically it is probably correct, but it misses two big points.
One, the systems will still be effective in controlling the behavior of most users, and protecting most of the profits of the gatekeepers.
Two, the good-enough security of these systems will suppress cultural innovation by making it harder for content and software developers to get their goods onto these platforms without first going through the approval process of a gatekeeper.
A good example of where they're trying to go is what Danger has put together with the hiptop device. You can not develop software for that platform and let users install it on their devices, unless Danger approves. And they don't approve anything if it won't 1) make them money and 2) protect the existing tollbooths set up by them and the carriers. Check out this excerpt of an interview with the Danger CEO:
Danger sells out its users
So far their security has not been cracked, and they are effectively limiting what programs can appear on that platform. You shouldn't think that other companies cannot do the same. The really relevant question is not can the security work. The question that matters is will users accept this kind of locked up solution.