At 12:59 AM 06/27/2002 -0700, Lucky Green wrote:
I fully agree that the TCPA's efforts offer potentially beneficial effects. Assuming the TPM has not been compromised, the TPM should enable to detect if interested parties have replaced you NIC with the rarer, but not unheard of, variant that ships out the contents of your operating RAM via DMA and IP padding outside the abilities of your OS to detect.
It can? I thought that DMA was there to let you avoid bothering the CPU. The Alternate NIC card would need to have a CPU of its own to do a good job of this, but that's not hard.
However, enabling platform security, as much as might be stressed otherwise by the stakeholders, has never been the motive behind the TCPA. The motive has been DRM. Does this mean that one should ignore the benefits that TCPA might bring? Of course not. But it does mean that one should carefully weigh the benefits against the risks.
There's also the difficulty that, while it might be good at DRM, it might or might not be good at letting users write programs that are good at security. It's certainly never been a Microsoft specialty. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@wasabisystems.com