----- Original Message ----- From: "Anonymous" <nobody@cryptofortress.com> Subject: Re: An attack on paypal --> secure UI for browsers

You clearly know virtually nothing about Palladium.

Actually, properly designed Palladium would be little more than a smart card welded to the motherboard. As currently designed it is a complete second system that is allowed to take over the main processor. It has a few aspects of what it should be, but not many. It does include the various aspects of the smart card, but it also makes room for those aspects to take over the main system, properly designed this would not be an option, of course properly designed it could also be a permanently attached $1 smart card that internally hangs off the USB controller instead of a mammoth undertaking. I still stand by, "Arbitrarily trusting anyone to write a secure program simply doesn't work" regardless of how many times MS says "trust us" any substantially educated person should as well be prepared to either trust a preponderance of evidence, or perform their own examination, neither of these options is available. The information available does not cover the technical information, in fact their "Technical FAQ" about it actually has the following: "Q: Does this technology require an online connection to be used? A: No. " That is just sooooo enlightening, and is about as far from a useful answer as possible.

NCAs do not have "complete access to private information". Quite the opposite. Rather, NCAs have the power to protect private information such that no other software on the machine can access it. They do so by using the Palladium software and hardware to encrypt the private data. The encryption is done in such a way that it is "sealed" to the particular NCA, and no other software is allowed to use the Palladium crypto hardware to decrypt it.

This applies only under the condition that the software in Palladium is perfectly secure. Again I point to the issues with ActiveX, where a wide variety of hoels have been found, I point to the newest MS operating system which has it even been out a month yet? and already has a security patch available, in spite of their "secure by default" process. Again I don't believe this is because MS is inherently bad, it is because writing secure programs is extremely difficult, MS just has the most feature bloat so they have the most problems. If the Palladium software is actually secure (unlikely), then there is the issue of how the (foolishly trusted) NCAs are determined to be the same, this is an easy problem to solve if no one ever added features, but a hard one to solve where the program evolves, once MS shows the solution for this, I will point to the same information and show you a security hole.

In the proposed usage, an NCA associated with an ecommerce site would seal the data which is used by the user to authenticate to the remote site.

After running unattended on your computer, a <sarcasm>brilliant</sarcasm> idea, hasn't anyone learned?

The authentication data doesn't actually have to be a certificate with associated key, but that would be one possibility. Only NCAs signed by that ecommerce site's key would be able to unseal and access the user's authentication credentials. This prevents rogue software from stealing them and impersonating the user.

Not in the slightest, a single compromise of a single ecommerce site (remember they're "trusted") will remove all this pretend security. Let's use a particularly popular example on here right now www.e-go1d.com, they could easily apply to be an ecommerce site, they collect money, they offer a service, clearly they are an ecommerce site. Are you really gullible enough to believe that they won't do everything in their power to exploit the data transfer problem above, as well as any other holes in Palladium? I should hope not.

Seriously, have you read any of the documents linked from http://www.microsoft.com/resources/ngscb/?

Yes I have, in fact at this point I think it is safe to say that you have not, or you didn't understand the implications of the small amount of information it actually contains. Joe