Controversial Security Paper Nixed From Black Hat

coondoggie writes us with a link to the Network World site, as he tends to do. Today he offers an article discussing the cancellation of a presentation which would have undermined chip-based security on PCs. Scheduled during the Black Hat USA 2007 event, the event's briefing promised to break the Trusted Computing Group's module, as well as Vista's Bitlocker. Live demos were to be included. The presenters pulled the event, and have no interest in discussing the subject any more. "[Presenters Nitin and Vipin Kumar's] promised exploit would be a chink in the armor of hardware-based system integrity that [trusted platform module] (TPM) is designed to ensure. TPM is also a key component of Trusted Computing Group's architecture for network access control (NAC). TPM would create a unique value or hash of all the steps of a computer's boot sequence that would represent the particular state of that machine, according to Steve Hanna, co-chair of TCG's NAC effort."

Comments

Money talks...

[Eric Damron]

And apparently can silence as well...

It's too bad. Any vulnerability will not go away just because it is not discussed. What this WILL do is make it more likely that some hacker will make a large profit selling the vulnerability to the bad guys. Black hats will have it but the white hats that would be the first line of defense have been barred from having the knowledge they need to mitigate the threat.