Re: Trustworthy Computing Mini-Poll

[Simon Richter <Simon.Richter () hogyros de>]

Heorgi,

On Sun, Dec 22, 2002 at 02:29:26PM +0200, Georgi Guninski wrote:
> Simon Richter wrote:
> > [...] and I'm asking now whether you would like
> > those features on your home box as well, even if you had to give up DVD
> > copying or get special illegal hardware for it.

> "Illegal hardware"???

Special hardware designed to break a copy protection.

> Is my customized linux "illegal software" under this nonsense?

No, just untrusted, so you won't be able to play DVDs with it. Unless
you add some tricks to it so the DVD believes it is talking to a trusted
player, which would be somewhere along the lines of writing software to
decrypt eBooks... :-/

> The people proposing such nonsense should get real - there are quite a ways 
> to modify processes execution, the simplest being a debugger.

I believe they have thought about this. Trusted software can only be
debugged on a special "developer" machine. My personal favourite would
be the "carefully crafted" DVD, which uses a buffer overflow in a player
routine (where people optimize for speed over security anyway). :-)

   Simon

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