Re: Confinement (even with TPMs) and DRM are not mutually exclusive

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 21:11 +0200, Bas Wijnen wrote:

> > Similarly, a server cannot tell if the user is actually logged in at a
> > terminal at all -- it can only tell that it has received input from a
> > connection that appears to constitute an authentication sequence.
> 
> The assumption is that only the user can authenticate.  If this assumption is
> not true, then there is something wrong with the authentication mechanism,
> which should be fixed.

Nonsense. The assumption is universally false. The computer *never*
knows whether the user has authenticated. What the computer knows is
that characters have been sent from a device. The assumption that these
characters originated from a user is just that -- an assumption. This is
not a question of bugs. It is a consequence of the absence of an
end-to-end trusted path.

> > Your original statement was that the system could trust the terminal. In
> > many circumstances this is "true enough" in practice that we can get
> > useful work done, but it definitely is NOT true if we are dealing with
> > anything sensitive.
> 
> Well, it depends on what machines we're talking about.  For desktop computers,
> which are inside the home of the owner, it is very reasonable to let the owner
> be responsible for the hardware security (that is, that no hardware sniffers
> are installed).

If you believe this, you have not been reading the US newspapers. It is
quite amazing how many keyboard sniffers are getting installed (amazing
and, I might add, depressing).

> > In particular, it is not true for credit transactions.
> 
> You mean money machines?  No, in that case the terminal design is very hard, I
> can imagine.  However, as I said, that's not a software problem. :-)

No, I simply meant credit transactions on the web from a home computer.

Yes. ATM terminals are hard to design well. Banks accept a very high
rate of loss per ATM as a cost of doing business. Sadly, this rate of
loss remains lower than the cost of paying humans to work at the bank.


shap