Challenge to TCPA/Palladium detractors

[R. Hirschfeld]

> Date: Fri, 9 Aug 2002 19:30:09 -0700
> From: AARG!Anonymous <remailer at aarg.net>

> Re the debate over whether compilers reliably produce identical object
> (executable) files:
> 
> The measurement and hashing in TCPA/Palladium will probably not be done
> on the file itself, but on the executable content that is loaded into
> memory.  For Palladium it is just the part of the program called the
> "trusted agent".  So file headers with dates, compiler version numbers,
> etc., will not be part of the data which is hashed.
> 
> The only thing that would really break the hash would be changes to the
> compiler code generator that cause it to create different executable
> output for the same input.  This might happen between versions, but
> probably most widely used compilers are relatively stable in that
> respect these days.  Specifying the compiler version and build flags
> should provide good reliability for having the executable content hash
> the same way for everyone.

A trivial observation: this cannot be true across hardware platforms.
TCPA claims to be "platform and OS agnostic", but Palladium does not.

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