More Trusted Computing inaccuracies

Posted by Ken Y-N on July 31st, 2008 at 02:57pm

Sorry about the quiet patch recently, but I’m now back and refreshed from holiday, ready to do battle against yet more misconceptions, along with the usual news from the trusted computing world.

The first article to get my back up on my return was from Michael Tiemann writing on Open Source Initiative in an article entitled What Microsoft can do for Open Source.

The meat of the article is interesting and well worth reading, written from the point of view of an open source advocate critically reviewing a keynote speech from Sam Ramji of Micrsoft at OSCON 2008.

However, in his list of four things he wants Microsoft to do (I only rate number four as likely!), his second is baffling:

Unilaterally promise to not use the DMCA to maintain control of their Trusted Computing Platform.

If we are talking about a Trusted Platform Module-based system, I cannot see the relation to the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) at all. Perhaps he refers to hacking (or more likely, leaking) of the private portion of the Microsoft signing key, but that is not directly a TCP issue. Perhaps he means cirumvention of, for instance, the TPM drivers, but again that is not a direct TCP issue.

The Protected Media Path technology for media playback differs from the TCP, and I could see how circumvention, such as when someone published a hack for removing the Windows Media DRM, could fall foul of the DCMA, which Microsoft did (sort of) resort to.

As I’ve said before and no doubt will say many, many times again, ignoring patent issues, there is absolutely no reason why a Trusted Platform Module could not be made open source to the standard as defined by the GPL (Gnu Public Licence) v2.0 without comprimising security.

Read the full post on the Open Source Initiative blog here.

Tags: dmca

Under Advocacy Tags: dmca