TCPA/Palladium user interst vs third party interest (Re: responding to claims about TCPA)

[Adam Back]

The remote attesation is the feature which is in the interests of
third parties.

I think if this feature were removed the worst of the issues the
complaints are around would go away because the remaining features
would be under the control of the user, and there would be no way for
third parties to discriminate against users who did not use them, or
configured them in given ways.

The remaining features of note being sealing, and integrity metric
based security boot-strapping.

However the remote attestation is clearly the feature that TCPA, and
Microsoft place most value on (it being the main feature allowing DRM,
and allowing remote influence and control to be exerted on users
configuration and software choices).

So the remote attesation feature is useful for _servers_ that want to
convince clients of their trust-worthiness (that they won't look at
content, tamper with the algorithm, or anonymity or privacy properties
etc).  So you could imagine that feature being a part of server
machines, but not part of client machines -- there already exists some
distinctions between client and server platforms -- for example high
end Intel chips with larger cache etc intended for server market by
their pricing.  You could imagine the TCPA/Palladium support being
available at extra cost for this market.

But the remaining problem is that the remote attesation is kind of
dual-use (of utility to both user desktop machines and servers).  This
is because with peer-to-peer applications, user desktop machines are
also servers.

So the issue has become entangled.

It would be useful for individual liberties for remote-attestation
features to be widely deployed on desktop class machines to build
peer-to-peer systems and anonymity and privacy enhancing systems.

However the remote-attestation feature is also against the users
interests because it's wide-spread deployment is the main DRM enabling
feature and general tool for remote control descrimination against
user software and configuration choices.

I don't see any way to have the benefits without the negatives, unless
anyone has any bright ideas.  The remaining questions are:

- do the negatives out-weigh the positives (lose ability to
reverse-engineer and virtualize applications, and trade
software-hacking based BORA for hardware-hacking based ROCA);

- are there ways to make remote-attestation not useful for DRM,
eg. limited deployment, other;

- would the user-positive aspects of remote-attestation still be
largely available with only limited-deployment -- eg could interesting
peer-to-peer and privacy systems be built with a mixture of
remote-attestation able and non-remote-attestation able nodes.

Adam
--
http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/

On Sat, Aug 10, 2002 at 04:02:36AM -0700, John Gilmore wrote:
> One of the things I told them years ago was that they should draw
> clean lines between things that are designed to protect YOU, the
> computer owner, from third parties; versus things that are designed to
> protect THIRD PARTIES from you, the computer owner.  This is so
> consumers can accept the first category and reject the second, which,
> if well-informed, they will do.  If it's all a mishmash, then
> consumers will have to reject all of it, and Intel can't even improve
> the security of their machines FOR THE OWNER, because of their history
> of "security" projects that work against the buyer's interest, such as
> the Pentium serial number and HDCP.
> [...]

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at wasabisystems.com