Talk at CMU on 19 Nov the Microsoft "Palladium" Initiative by Brian A. LaMacchia MS

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Brian said in a note to me "I hope to provide a good technical description
of what Palladium is & isn't so that we can then talk about both the
technical & non-technical issues around Palladium in particular & "trusted
computing platforms" in general. It's not a marketing pitch by any means and
we're very interested in feedback from the academic community on the current
design." This talk should be of strong interest to both the technical and
policy communities.

Djf 



Title:    the Microsoft "Palladium" Initiative

Date: 19 Nov at CMU 1:30 ish exact time and place to be announced

Abstract:

This talk will present a technical overview of the Microsoft "Palladium"
Initiative.  The "Palladium" code name refers to a set of hardware and
software security features currently under development for a future
version of the Windows operating system.  "Palladium" adds four
categories of security services to today's PCs:

  a. Curtained memory. The ability to wall off and hide pages of main
memory so that each "Palladium" application can be assured that it is
not modified or observed by any other application or even the
operating system.

  b. Attestation. The ability for a piece of code to digitally sign
or otherwise attest to a piece of data and further assure the
signature recipient that the data was constructed by an unforgeable,
cryptographically identified software stack.

  c. Sealed storage. The ability to securely store information so
that a "Palladium" application or module can mandate that the
information be accessible only to itself or to a set of other trusted
components that can be identified in a cryptographically secure
manner.

  d. Secure input and output. A secure path from the keyboard and
mouse to "Palladium" applications, and a secure path from "Palladium"
applications to an identifiable region of the screen.

Together, these features provide a parallel execution environment to
the "traditional" kernel- and user-mode stacks.  The goal of
"Palladium" is to help protect software from software; that is, to
provide a set of features and services that a software application can
use to defend against malicious software also running on the machine
(viruses running in the main operating system, keyboard sniffers,
frame grabbers, etc).  "Palladium" is not designed to provide defenses
against hardware-based attacks that originate from someone in control
of the local machine.

Brian A. LaMacchia is a Software Architect in the Windows Trusted
Platforms Technologies group at Microsoft, a position he has held since
June 2002.  Previously Brian was the Development Lead for the .NET
Framework Security infrastructure, and he began his career at Microsoft
as the Program Manager for core cryptography in Windows 2000.  Prior to
joining Microsoft Brian was a member of the Public Policy Research Group
at AT&T Labs-Research in Florham Park, NJ. He received S.B., S.M., and
Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in
1990, 1991, and 1996, respectively.  

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