Microsoft: “Trust us!”

Posted by Ken Y-N on April 10th, 2008 at 03:15pm

At a keynote speech at the RSA Conference 2008 at San Francisco, Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, talked about Microsoft’s vision for End to End Trust. Initiatives such as the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) have laid the foundations for security, but now higher-level protocols need to be considered.

One key idea is proving you are who you say you are, such as providing a certificate that proves you are over eighteen before accessing an adult-oriented web site. At the moment management systems are disjoint and complicated, so Microsoft wants to make it simpler, or wants to own the process, depending on one’s view of the Redmond giant.

Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for BT, and all-round security guru, was asked for comments after seeing the Microsoft documents on End to End Trust. He dismissed the initiative saying “it feels general and like marketing hype”, and as for the need for centralised authentication, the idea “is just silly”. He sees Microsoft as using identity and rights management as a way to lock users into their products and deny competition entry into their arena.

Microsoft’s George Stathakopoulos, general manager of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, dismissed Schneier’s criticisms as the usual skepticism and conspiracy theories that all Microsoft’s initiatives attract.

This story was fully reported on News Blog.

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