You say Express Gate, I say Palladium
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Futures, Silicon, virtualisation, Hardware, Laptop, Mobile, Security, Intel, Microsoft on
Imagine a second, simpler operating system on your PC with fixed features, so it’s more secure - after all, if you can’t add more programs you can’t add a virus either. It would have to start up quickly, so that Windows wasn’t waiting for it, so it would be ideal for listening to music and watching video. I’m not thinking about virtualization per se, although that’s one way to achieve something similar; this is two operating systems side by side, both with access to the PC hardware, but one of them does much more limited and circumscribed things.
Can you tell what it is yet?
No, actually, I’m not talking about Palladium - sorry, Microsoft Next Generation Secure Computing Base. That grew out of an attempt to reassure Sony that it would be OK to allow DVD movies to play on a PC without piracy becoming endemic and turned into a much more useful and visionary idea about using public key cryptography not to identify people but to secure machines. It would have been a good way to implement the DRM it was associated with in the public eye, though wouldn’t have forced it on anyone who didn’t want to run it. Palladium loaded a secure piece of software called the TOR that acted as a secure area that could only run trusted code (written to public APIs), where the apps would be invisible to the main OS - all secured by the machine-specific key in your TPM and some new technology from Intel.
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Loading ...Comment by steven Sprague - August 7, 2008 on 5:49 pm
Great article. You should also point out that the TPM which is now on about 150 million pcs is a fantastic way to have a common authentication platform for all web services. This will be the technology that kill UID and PW. Every VPN and Wireless access point be putting the keys in the TPM. It works today, Its easy to do however most IT professionals haven’t tried. Best Practice is all software certificates need to be moved to hardware.
Steven Sprague
Comment by Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe - August 7, 2008 on 6:44 pm
Good point Steve; I actually like Intel’s notion of a trusted PC and a trusted platform as the root of trust for user identity feeding into an Internet identity layer (I’m a big fan of Kim Cameron’s infocard approach). But how do we get things to move forward? So far I’ve found nothing mainstream but fingerprint password vaults that actually use TPM in the real world (and vPro, but that still seems to be in demo mode)…
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