[11581] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Palladium and malware
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Thu Aug 29 11:17:51 2002
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 23:00:16 -0700
To: Paul Crowley <paul@ciphergoth.org>
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Cc: cryptography@wasabisystems.com
In-Reply-To: <87ofbm8p49.fsf@saltationism.subnet.hedonism.cluefactory.or
g.uk>
At 01:50 AM 08/29/2002 +0100, Paul Crowley wrote:
>I'm informed that malware authors often go to some lengths to prevent
>their software from being disassembled. Could they use Palladium for
>this end? Are there any ways in which the facilities that Palladium
>and TCPA provide could be useful to a malware author who wants to
>frustrate legitimate attempts to understand and defeat their software?
Hey, that's clever. If the Palladium and/or TCPA stuff is designed
generally enough that anybody can use it, then certainly
malware authors can do so just about as well as copy-protection-ware
authors or spyware authors can. (If it's designed so that
only Officially Licensed Trusted Developers can have the keys they need,
then malware authors will have to write their code the old-fashioned way.)
The more interesting question, I suspect, is how much access a
TCPA or Palladium program has to the surrounding environment -
is it a platform that makes it easy for the consumer to trust programs
written to run on it not to mess up their machines,
or is it *only* to let authors trust the machines not to
examine or change their programs?
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