Richard Stallman “is wrong” on TPM

Posted by Ken Y-N on March 17th, 2008 at 05:00am

This is a slightly old blog post that I have only recently come across, but I thought it is worth reporting on, written by a strong supporter of the Freee Software Foundation and all it stands for.

Last year Richard M Stallman (RMS from here on in) published a rebuttal of Trusted Computing – he called it Treacherous Computing – on the GNU project web site, but David Smith felt he was very much mistaken in his understanding and characterizing of what the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) does. Here’s some of what he says:

As I push for more security in the applications I depend on every day, it disturbs me to think that responses like RMS’s to trusted computing are believed without being validated. If you just casually read the TPM specs, it’s clear that they’re talking about allowing users to store secret information securely, not any of the extrapolation or inference that RMS puts into his “Can You Trust Your Computer?” essay. He’s using the same FUD tactics he wagged his finger at when Microsoft tried to say Free Software was inherently low quality.

Mr Smith has been trying to get his TPM to function as a PKCS#11 smartcard to enable strong storage of secret keys, and although there is Open Source Software to support the TPM stack and the PKCS#11 smartcard interface, very little there is very little software that makes use of the very useful functionality provided by these devices. However, RMS spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) doesn’t encourage developers to put more effort into supporting strong security for their applications.

Read the full story on lazyweb classifieds, and RMS’s article from the GNU web site.

Tags: rms

Under TPM Tags: rms