On Jan 8, 6:42 am, Arno Wagner wrote:
In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc wrote:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/06/2132247
(notice that they call the locked down execution part "TXT". I don't
trust anyone who has to resort to [W][O][R][D][G][A][M][E][S] to try
to sneak stuff like this under the public radar.
From the same pagehttp://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1082397&cid=26351915
I am a programmer, and in particular I have studied the Trusted
Platform Technical Specification documentation. All 332 pages of dense
technicaleese. There is one particular page I would like to cite. In
the TCPA Main TCG Architecture v1_1b.pdf on page 277 the documentation
comes right out and announces the fact it is designed to be secure
against "rogue Owners".
You are either mistaken, or you're full of crap. The chip is in fact
designed to lock the computer against the owner. Yes, locks that are
designed to protect the computer against it's owner will also prevent
outside attackers from doing things that the owner himself is
forbidden to do. However that is incidental. A hostile Trusted
Computing system trying to lock computers against their owners is
fundamentally different than a system designed to secure computers for
the owner.

This is very old news and well known in the academic IT security
community. It is also the main counterargument to this hardware.

From the refusal to give the user control at need, I deduce that
this chip is indeed primarily targetted at taking control away
from the user, and that protecting against external threats
is only a secondary goal, or maybe just somethign invented by
marketing.

Still important to explain this to people until this technological
atrocity goes away.

Arno

What this needs to be is shown on mainstream media. Or course, given
that mainstream media is a bunch of corporate whores it might be very
hard to do so, but it has to be done. Any ideas?