Trusted Computing damned with faint praise

Posted by Ken Y-N on October 27th, 2008 at 02:00pm

I might be just a bit slow and missing the point, but a recent post on the W-Shadow.com blog on Less Popular Revolutions picked Trusted Computing as one of the candidates.

[Trusted Computing] could have a huge impact on our lives and provide us with many new and exciting benefits:

Better protection from viruses, malware and phishing. Excellent protection against identity theft. And the best part – no more cheaters in online games (yes, really). No more piracy! Finally, DRM would become more than a nuisance – controlled by the copyright-owners, your hardware would simply refuse to run pirated software or play DVD rips. No more anonymity! Each piece of hardware can be uniquely identified and, with some effort, linked to the user’s identity.

It starts off OK, but then it goes a bit downhill, and sadly it repeats the common miconception that the TPM will be controlled (for whatever definition of controlled that the author has in mind) by some remote party. In addition, the unique identity is true, but the TPM owner can choose not to transmit it, and it cannot be linked to the user’s identity, thanks to the Direct Anonymous Attestation protocol.

I really should add a category Wrong! to this blog!

Tags: wrong

Under Advocacy Tags: wrong