[11467] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Palladium: technical limits and implications
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ben Laurie)
Mon Aug 12 10:39:04 2002
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 13:52:39 +0100
From: Ben Laurie <ben@algroup.co.uk>
To: "AARG!Anonymous" <remailer@aarg.net>
Cc: adam@cypherspace.org, cryptography@wasabisystems.com,
cypherpunks@lne.com
AARG!Anonymous wrote:
> Adam Back writes:
>
>>I have one gap in the picture:
>>
>>In a previous message in this Peter Biddle said:
>>
>>
>>>In Palladium, SW can actually know that it is running on a given
>>>platform and not being lied to by software. [...] (Pd can always be
>>>lied to by HW - we move the problem to HW, but we can't make it go
>>>away completely).
>>
>
> Obviously no application can reliably know anything if the OS is hostile.
> Any application can be meddled with arbitrarily by the OS. In fact
> every bit of the app can be changed so that it does something entirely
> different. So in this sense it is meaningless to speak of an app that
> can't be lied to by the OS.
>
> What Palladium can do, though, is arrange that the app can't get at
> previously sealed data if the OS has meddled with it. The sealing
> is done by hardware based on the app's hash. So if the OS has changed
> the app per the above, it won't be able to get at old sealed data.
I don't buy this: how does Palladium know what an app is without the OS'
help?
Cheers,
Ben.
--
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Available for contract work.
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