a comment about Palladium in CryptoGraph

[Michael Richardson]

http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram.html

From: Niels Ferguson <niels at ferguson.net>
Subject: Palladium

Microsoft claims lots of benefits for Pd, some of which are to allow 
Digital Rights Management (DRM).  However, most of the benefits can 
already be achieved by existing hardware.  All Intel CPUs since the 286 
have had very good hardware separation between tasks.  It is only 
Microsoft's choice not to use this feature that has led to a single 
hunk of inter-dependent code.

Intel CPUs can protect one program from the other.  You can create 
secure device drivers which can no longer crash you computer.  But, the 
basic operating system will always have full control of the 
computer.  So you can protect programs from each other, and the user 
from malicious programs, but the user always maintains complete control 
over his machine.

What Pd adds is to take control away from the user.  It "allows" the 
user to give up part of his control over the machine, and give it to a 
program.  This is of course required for DRM, but I cannot really think 
of any other application.  They talked about some things like banking 
software, but that is just silly.  We have perfectly good cryptography 
to handle those threats, and using Pd for banking would be very 
dangerous.  After all, the Pd chip isn't protected against physical 
attacks, so you have to trust the owner of the computer anyway.

There was some misdirection about it not being possible to change the 
whole Windows operating system, so Pd is needed to create a kind of 
micro-kernel under the OS.  This is not true.  You can do the same on 
Intel hardware; VMware is a good example.  Microsoft can achieve the 
same security features (except for DRM) using existing hardware and the 
same amount of software development effort.

My conclusion: The only reason for Pd is DRM.  All the rest is just a 
smoke-screen, or stupidity.  You can never tell the difference.

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