TCPA / Palladium-版權控管保護-Intel 公司發起,微軟新一代的作業系統裡的計劃之一
^^。[B]轉貼 TCPA / Palladium Frequently Asked Questions [url]http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html[/url][/B]
1. What are TCPA and Palladium?
TCPA stands for the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, an initiative led by Intel. Their stated goal is `a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform.' Palladium is software that Microsoft says it plans to incorporate in future versions of Windows; it will build on the TCPA hardware, and will add some extra features.
2. What does TCPA / Palladium do, in ordinary English?
It provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the applications, and where these applications can communicate securely with the vendor. The obvious application is digital rights management (DRM): Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a Palladium platform, but which you won't be able to copy. The music industry will be able to sell you music downloads that you won't be able to swap. They will be able to sell you CDs that you'll only be able to play three times, or only on your birthday. All sorts of new marketing possibilities will open up.
TCPA / Palladium will also make it much harder for you to run unlicensed software. Pirate software can be detected and deleted remotely. It will also make it easier for people to rent software rather than buying it; and if you stop paying the rent, then not only does the software stop working but so may the files it created. For years, Bill Gates has dreamed of finding a way to make the Chinese pay for software: Palladium could be the answer to his prayer.
There are many other possibilities. Governments will be able to arrange things so that all Word documents created on civil servants' PCs are `born classified' and can't be leaked electronically to journalists. Auction sites might insist that you use trusted proxy software for bidding, so that you can't bid tactically at the auction. Cheating at computer games could be made more difficult.
There is a downside too. There will be remote censorship: the mechanisms designed to delete pirated music under remote control may be used to delete documents that a court (or a software company) has decided are offensive - this could be anything from pornography to writings that criticise political leaders. Software companies can also make it harder for you to switch to their competitors' products; for example, Word could encrypt all your documents using keys that only Microsoft products have access to; this would mean that you could only read them using Microsoft products, not with any competing word processor.
3. So I won't be able to play MP3s on my PC any more?
With existing MP3s, you may be all right for some time. Microsoft says that Palladium won't make anything suddenly stop working. But a recent software update for Windows Media Player has caused controversy by insisting that users agree to future anti-piracy measures, which may include measures that delete pirated content found on your computer. Also, some programs that give people more control over their PCs, such as VMware and Total Recorder, are unlikely to work under TCPA. So you may have to use a different player - and if your player will play pirate MP3s, then it seems unlikely to be authorised to play the new, protected, titles.
It is up to an application to set the security policy for its files, using an online policy server. So Media Player will determine what sort of conditions get attached to protected titles, and I expect Microsoft will do all sorts of deals with the content providers, who will experiment with all sorts of business models. You might get CDs that are a third of the price but which you can only play three times; if you pay the other two-thirds, you'd get full rights. You might be allowed to lend your copy of some digital music to a friend, but then your own backup copy won't be playable until your friend gives you the main copy back. More likely, you will not be able to lend music at all. These policies will make life inconvenient for some people; for example, regional coding might stop you watching the Polish version of a movie if your PC was bought outside Europe.
This could all be done today - Microsoft would just have to download a patch into your player - but once TCPA / Palladium makes it hard for people to tamper with the player software, and easier for Microsoft to control upgrades and patches, it will be harder for you to escape, and will therefore be a more attractive way of doing business.
4. How does it work?
TCPA provides for a monitoring and reporting component to be mounted in future PCs. The preferred implementation in the first phase of TCPA is a `Fritz' chip - a smartcard chip or dongle soldered to the motherboard.
When you boot up your PC, Fritz takes charge. He checks that the boot ROM is as expected, executes it, measures the state of the machine; then checks the first part of the operating system, loads and executes it, checks the state of the machine; and so on. The trust boundary, of hardware and software considered to be known and verified, is steadily expanded. A table is maintained of the hardware (audio card, video card etc) and the software (O/S, drivers, etc); Fritz checks that the hardware components are on the TCPA approved list, that the software components have been signed, and that none of them has a serial number that has been revoked. If there are significant changes to the PC's configuration, the machine must go online to be re-certified. The result is a PC booted into a known state with an approved combination of hardware and software (whose licences have not expired). Control is then handed over to enforcement software in the operating system - this will be Palladium if your operating system is Windows.
Once the machine is in this state, Fritz can certify it to third parties: for example, he will do an authentication protocol with Disney to prove that his machine is a suitable recipient of `Snow White'. This will mean certifying that the PC is currently running an authorised application program - MediaPlayer, DisneyPlayer, whatever. The Disney server then sends encrypted data, with a key that Fritz will use to unseal it. Fritz makes the key available only to the authorised application and only so long as the environment remains `trustworthy'. For this purpose, `trustworthy' is defined by the security policy downloaded from a server under the control of the application owner. This means that Disney can decide to release its premium content to a given media player application in return for a contract that the application will not make any unauthorised copies of content, will impose a certain set of conditions (including what level of security has to be set in TCPA). This can involve payment: Disney might insist, for example, that the application collect a dollar every time you view the movie. In fact, the application itself can be rented too, and this is of great interest to software companies. The possibilities seem to be limited only by the marketers' imagination.
5. What else can TCPA and Palladium be used for?
TCPA can also be used to implement much stronger access controls on confidential documents. For example, an army might arrange that its soldiers can only create Word documents marked at `Confidential' or above, and that only a TCPA PC with a certificate issued by its own security agency can read such a document. This is called `mandatory access control', and governments are keen on it. The Palladium announcement implies that the Microsoft product will support this: you will be able to configure Word so that it will encrypt all documents generated in a given compartment on your machine, and share it only with other users in a defined group.
Corporations will be able to do this too, to make life harder for whistleblowers. They can arrange that company documents can only be read on company PCs, unless a suitably authorised person clears them for export. They can also implement timelocks: they can arrange, for example, that all emails evaporate after 90 days unless someone makes a positive effort to preserve them. (Think of how useful that would have been for Enron, or Arthur Andersen, or for Microsoft itself during the antitrust case.) The Mafia might use the same facilities: they could arrange that the spreadhseet with the latest drug shipments can only be read on accredited Mafia PCs, and will vanish at the end of the month. This might make life harder for the FBI - though Microsoft is in discussions with governments about whether policemen and spies will get some kind of access to master keys. But, in any case, a whistleblower who emails a document to a journalist will achieve little, as the journalist's Fritz chip won't give him the key to decipher it.
TCPA / Palladium also seems destined for use in electronic payment systems. One of the Microsoft visions appears to be that much of the functionality now built on top of bank cards may move into software once the applications can be made tamper-resistant. This is needed if we are to have a future in which we pay for books that we read, and music we listen to, at the rate of so many pennies per page or per minute. Even if this doesn't work out as a business model - and there are good arguments why it won't - there is clearly a competitive issue for a number of online payment systems, and there may be spillover effects for the user. If, in ten years' time, it's inconvenient to shop online with a credit card unless you use a TCPA or Palladium platform, then this could move a lot of people over to the system.
6. OK, so there will be winners and losers - Disney might win big, and smartcard makers might go bust. But surely Microsoft and Intel are not investing nine figures just for charity? How do they propose to make money out of it?
My spies at Intel tell me that it was a defensive play. As they make most of their money from PC microprocessors, and have most of the market, they can only grow their company by increasing the size of the market. They are determined that the PC will be the hub of the future home network. If entertainment is the killer application, and DRM is going to be the critical enabling technology, then the PC has to do DRM or risk being displaced in the home market.
Microsoft were also motivated by the desire to bring all of entertainment within their empire. But they also stand to win big if either TCPA or Palladium becomes widespread, as they will be able to use it to cut down dramatically on software copying. `Making the Chinese pay for software' has been a big thing for Bill; with Palladium, he can tie each PC to its individual licenced copy of Office, and with TCPA he can tie each motherboard to its individual licenced copy of Windows. TCPA will also have a worldwide blacklist for the serial numbers of any copies of Office that get pirated.
Finally, Microsoft would like to make it more expensive for people to switch away from their products (such as Office) to rival products (such as OpenOffice). This will enable them to charge more for upgrades without making their users jump ship.
7. Where did the idea come from?
It first appeared in a paper by Bill Arbaugh, Dave Farber and Jonathan Smith, ``A Secure and Reliable Bootstrap Architecture'', in the proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (1997) pp 65-71. It led to a US patent: ``Secure and Reliable Bootstrap Architecture'', U.S. Patent No. 6,185,678, February 6th, 2001. Bill's thinking developed from work he did while working for the NSA on code signing in 1994. The Microsoft folk have also applied for patent protection on the operating system aspects. (The patent texts are here andhere.)
There may be quite a lot of prior art. Markus Kuhn wrote about the TrustNo1 Processor years ago, and the basic idea - a specially trusted `reference monitor' that supervises a computer's access control functions - goes back at least to a paper written by James Anderson for the USAF in 1972. It has been a feature of US military secure systems thinking since then.
8. How is this related to the Pentium 3 serial number?
Intel started an earlier program in the mid-1990s that would have put the functionality of the Fritz chip inside the main PC processor, or the cache controller chip, by 2000. The Pentium serial number was a first step on the way. The adverse public reaction seems to have caused them to pause, set up a consortium with Microsoft and others, and seek safety in numbers.
9. Why call the monitor chip a `Fritz' chip?
In honour of Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, who is working tirelessly in Congress to make TCPA a mandatory part of all consumer electronics.
10. OK, so TCPA stops kids ripping off music and will help companies keep data confidential. It may help the Mafia too, unless the FBI get a back door, which I assume they will. But apart from pirates, industrial spies and activists, who has a problem with it?
A lot of companies stand to lose out. For example, the European smartcard industry looks likely to be hurt, as the functions now provided by their products migrate into the Fritz chips in peoples' laptops, PDAs and third generation mobile phones. In fact, much of the information security industry may be upset if TCPA takes off. Microsoft claims that Palladium will stop spam, viruses and just about every other bad thing in cyberspace - if so, then the antivirus companies, the spammers, the spam-filter vendors, the firewall firms and the intrusion detection folk could all have their lunch stolen.
There are serious concerns about the effects on the information goods and services industries, and in particular on innovation, on the rate at which new businesses are formed and on the likelihood that incumbent companies will be able to hang on to their monopolies. The problems for innovation are well explained in a recent New York Times column by the distinguished economist Hal Varian.
But there are much deeper problems. The fundamental issue is that whoever controls the Fritz chips will acquire a huge amount of power. Having this single point of control is like making everyone use the same bank, or the same accountant, or the same lawyer. There are many ways in which this power could be abused.
11. How can TCPA be abused?
One of the worries is censorship. TCPA was designed from the start to support the centralised revocation of pirate bits. Pirate software will be spotted and disabled by Fritz when you try to load it, but what about pirated songs or videos? And how could you transfer a song or video that you own from one PC to another, unless you can revoke it on the first machine? The proposed solution is that an application enabled for TCPA, such as a media player or word processor, will have its security policy administered remotely by a server, which will maintain a hot list of bad files. This will be downloaded from time to time and used to screen all files that the application opens. Files can be revoked by content, by the serial number of the application that created them, and by a number of other criteria. The proposed use for this is that if everyone in China uses the same copy of Office, you do not just stop this copy running on any machine that is TCPA-compliant; that would just motivate the Chinese to use normal PCs instead of TCPA PCs in order to escape revocation. So you also cause every TCPA-compliant PC in the world to refuse to read files that have been created using this pirate program.
This is bad enough, but the potential for abuse extends far beyond commercial bullying and economic warfare into political censorship. I expect that it will proceed a step at a time. First, some well-intentioned police force will get an order against a pornographic picture of a child, or a manual on how to sabotage railroad signals. All TCPA-compliant PCs will delete, or perhaps report, these bad documents. Then a litigant in a libel or copyright case will get a civil court order against an offending document; perhaps the Scientologists will seek to blacklist the famous Fishman Affidavit. Once lawyers and government censors realise the potential, the trickle will become a flood.
Now the modern age only started when Gutenberg invented movable type printing in Europe, which enabled information to be preserved and disseminated even if princes and bishops wanted to ban it. For example, when Wycliffe translated the Bible into English in 1380-1, the Lollard movement he started was suppressed easily; but when Tyndale translated the New Testament in 1524-5, he was able to print over 50,000 copies before they caught him and burned him at the stake. The old order in Europe collapsed, and the modern age began. Societies that tried to control information became uncompetitive, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union it seemed that democratic liberal capitalism had won. But now, TCPA and Palladium have placed at risk the priceless inheritance that Gutenberg left us. Electronic books, once published, will be vulnerable; the courts can order them to be unpublished and the TCPA infrastructure will do the dirty work.
So after the Soviet Union's attempts to register and control all typewriters and fax machines, TCPA attempts to register and control all computers. The implications for liberty, democracy and justice are worrying.
12. Scary stuff. But can't you just turn it off?
Sure - unless your system administrator configures your machine in such a way that TCPA is mandatory, you can always turn it off. You can then run your PC with administrator privileges, and use insecure applications.
There is one respect, though, in which you can't turn Fritz off. You can't make him ignore pirated software. Even if he's been informed that the PC is booting in untrusted mode, he still checks that the operating system isn't on the serial number revocation list. This has implications for national sovereignty. If Saddam is stupid enough to upgrade his PCs to use TCPA, then the American government will be able to hot-list his Windows licences, and thus shut down his PCs, next time there's a war. Booting in untrusted mode won't help. He'd have to dig out old copies of Windows 2000, change to GNU/linux, or find a way to isolate the Fritz chips from his motherboards without breaking them.
If you aren't someone the US President hates personally, this may not be an issue. But if you turn TCPA off, then your TCPA-enabled applications won't work, or won't work as well. It will be like switching from Windows to Linux nowadays; you may have more freedom, but end up having less choice. If the applications that use TCPA / Palladium are more attractive to the majority of people, you may end up simply having to use them - just as many people have to use Microsoft Word because all their friends and colleagues send them documents in Microsoft Word. Microsoft says that Palladium, unlike vanilla TCPA, will be able to run trusted and untrusted applications at the same time in different windows; this will presumably make it easier for people to start using it.
13. So economics are going to be significant here?
Exactly. The biggest profits in IT goods and services markets tend to go to companies that can establish platforms (such as Windows, or Word) and control compatibility with them, so as to manage the markets in complementary products. For example, some mobile phone vendors use challenge-response authentication to check that the phone battery is a genuine part rather than a clone - in which case, the phone will refuse to recharge it, and may even drain it as quickly as possible. Some printers authenticate their toner cartridges electronically; if you use a cheap substitute, the printer silently downgrades from 1200 dpi to 300 dpi. The Sony Playstation 2 uses similar authentication to ensure that memory cartridges were made by Sony rather than by a low-price competitor.
TCPA appears designed to maximise the effect, and thus the economic power, of such behaviour. Given Microsoft's record of competitive strategic plays, I expect that Palladium will support them. So if you control a TCPA-enabled application, then your policy server can enforce your choice of rules about which other applications will be allowed to use the files your code creates. These files can be protected using strong cryptography, with keys controlled by the Fritz chips on everybody's machines. What this means is that a successful TCPA-enabled application will be worth much more money to the software company that controls it, as they can rent out access to their interfaces for whatever the market will bear. So there will be huge pressures on software developers to enable their applications for TCPA; and if Palladium is the first operating system to support TCPA, this will give it a competitive advantage over GNU/Linux and MacOS with the developer community.
14. But hang on, doesn't the law give people a right to reverse engineer interfaces for compatibility?
Yes, and this is very important to the functioning of IT goods and services markets; see Samuelson and Scotchmer, ``The Law and Economics of Reverse Engineering'', Yale Law Journal, May 2002, 1575-1663. But the law in most cases just gives you the right to try, not to succeed. Back when compatibility meant messing around with file formats, there was a real contest - when Word and Word Perfect were fighting for dominance, each tried to read the other's files and make it hard for the other to read its own. However, with TCPA that game is over; without access to the keys, or some means of breaking into the chips, you've had it.
Locking competitors out of application file formats was one of the motivations for TCPA: see a post by Lucky Green, and go to his talk at Def Con to hear more. It's a tactic that's spreading beyond the computer world. Congress is getting upset at carmakers using data format lockout to stop their customers getting repairs done at independent dealers. And the Microsoft folk say they want Palladium everywhere, even in your watch. The economic consequences for independent businesses everywhere could be significant.
15. Can't TCPA be broken?
The early versions will be vulnerable to anyone with the tools and patience to crack the hardware (e.g., get clear data on the bus between the CPU and the Fritz chip). However, from phase 2, the Fritz chip will disappear inside the main processor - let's call it the `Hexium' - and things will get a lot harder. Really serious, well funded opponents will still be able to crack it. However, it's likely to go on getting more difficult and expensive.
Also, in many countries, cracking Fritz will be illegal. In the USA the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already does this, while in the EU the situation may vary from one country to another, depending on the way national regulations implement the EU Copyright Directive.
Also, in many products, compatibility control is already being mixed quite deliberately with copyright control. The Sony Playstation's authentication chips also contain the encryption algorithm for DVD, so that reverse engineers can be accused of circumventing a copyright protection mechanism and hounded under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The situation is likely to be messy - and that will favour large firms with big legal budgets.
16. What's the overall economic effect likely to be?
The content industries may gain a bit from cutting music copying - expect Sir Michael Jagger to get very slightly richer. But I expect the most significant economic effect will be to strengthen the position of incumbents in information goods and services markets at the expense of new entrants. This may mean a rise in the market cap of firms like Intel, Microsoft and IBM - but at the expense of innovation and growth generally. Eric von Hippel documents how most of the innovations that spur economic growth are not anticipated by the manufacturers of the platforms on which they are based; and technological change in the IT goods and services markets is usually cumulative. Giving incumbents new ways to make life harder for people trying to develop novel uses for their products will create all sorts of traps and perverse incentives.
The huge centralisation of economic power that TCPA / Palladium represents will favour large companies over small ones; there will be similar effects as Palladium applications enable large companies to capture more of the spillover from their economic activities, as with the car companies forcing car-owners to have their maintenance done at authorised dealerships. As most employment growth occurs in the small to medium business sector, this could have consequences for jobs.
There may also be distinct regional effects. For example, many years of government sponsorship have made Europe's smartcard industry strong, at the cost of crowding out other technological innovation in the region. Senior industry people to whom I have spoken anticipate that once the second phase of TCPA puts the Fritz functionality in the main processor, this will hammer smartcard sales. A number of TCPA company insiders have admitted to me that displacing smartcards from the authentication token market is one of their business goals. Many of the functions that smartcard makers want you to do with a card will instead be done in the Fritz chips of your laptop, your PDA and your mobile phone. If this industry is killed off by TCPA, Europe could be a significant net loser. Other large sections of the information security industry may also become casualties.
17. Who else will lose?
There will be many places where existing business processes break down in ways that allow copyright owners to extract new rents. For example, I recently applied for planning permission to turn some agricultural land that we own into garden; to do this, we needed to supply our local government with six copies of a 1:1250 map of the field. In the old days, everyone just got a map from the local library and photocopied it. Now, the maps are on a server in the library, with copyright control, and you can get a maximum of four copies of any one sheet. For an individual, that's easy enough to circumvent: buy four copies today and send a friend along tomorrow for the extra two. But businesses that use a lot of maps will end up paying more money to the map companies. This may be a small problem; mutiply it a thousandfold to get some idea of the effect on the overall economy. The net transfers of income and wealth are likely, once more, to be from small firms to large and from new firms to old.
This may hopefully cause political resistance. One well-known UK lawyer said that copyright law is only tolerated because it is not enforced against the vast majority of petty infringers. And there will be some particularly high-profile hard-luck cases. I understand that copyright regulations due out later this year in Britain will deprive the blind of the fair-use right to use their screen scraper software to read e-books. Normally, a bureaucratic stupidity like this might not matter much, as people would just ignore it, and the police would not be idiotic enough to prosecute anybody. But if the copyright regulations are enforced by hardware protection mechanisms that are impractical to break, then the blind may lose out seriously. (There are many other marginal groups under similar threat.)
18. Ugh. What else?
TCPA will undermine the General Public License (GPL), under which many free and open source software products are distributed. The GPL is designed to prevent the fruits of communal voluntary labour being hijacked by private companies for profit. Anyone can use and modify software distributed under this licence, but if you distribute a modified copy, you must make it available to the world, together with the source code so that other people can make subsequent modifications of their own.
At least two companies have started work on a TCPA-enhanced version of GNU/linux. This will involve tidying up the code and removing a number of features. To get a certificate from the TCPA corsortium, the sponsor will then have to submit the pruned code to an evaluation lab, together with a mass of documentation showing why various known attacks on the code don't work. (The evaluation is at level E3 - expensive enough to keep out the free software community, yet lax enough for most commercial software vendors to have a chance to get their lousy code through.) Although the modified program will be covered by the GPL, and the source code will be free to everyone, it will not make full use of the TCPA features unless you have a certificate for it that is specific to the Fritz chip on your own machine. That is what will cost you money (if not at first, then eventually).
You will still be free to make modifications to the modified code, but you won't be able to get a certificate that gets you into the TCPA system. Something similar happens with the linux supplied by Sony for the Playstation 2; the console's copy protection mechanisms prevent you from running an altered binary, and from using a number of the hardware features. Even if a philanthropist does a not-for-profit secure GNU/linux, the resulting product would not really be a GPL version of a TCPA operating system, but a proprietary operating system that the philanthropist could give away free. (There is still the question of who would pay for the user certificates.)
People believed that the GPL made it impossible for a company to come along and steal code that was the result of community effort. This helped make people willing to give up their spare time to write free software for the communal benefit. But TCPA changes that. Once the majority of PCs on the market are TCPA-enabled, the GPL won't work as intended. The benefit for Microsoft is not that this will destroy free software directly. The point is this: once people realise that even GPL'led software can be hijacked for commercial purposes, idealistic young programmers will be much less motivated to write free software.
19. I can see that some people will get upset about this.
And there are many other political issues - the transparency of processing of personal data enshrined in the EU data protection directive; the sovereignty issue, of whether copyright regulations will be written by national governments, as at present, or an application developer in Portland or Redmond; whether TCPA will be used by Microsoft as a means of killing off Apache; and whether people will be comfortable about the idea of having their PCs operated, in effect, under remote control -- control that could be usurped by courts or government agencies without their knowledge.
20. But hang on, isn't TCPA illegal under antitrust law?
Intel has honed a `platform leadership' strategy, in which they lead industry efforts to develop technologies that will make the PC more useful, such as the PCI bus and USB. Their modus operandi is described in a book by Gawer and Cusumano. Intel sets up a consortium to share the development of the technology, has the founder members put some patents into the pot, publishes a standard, gets some momentum behind it, then licenses it to the industry on the condition that licensees in turn cross-license any interfering patents of their own, at zero cost, to all consortium members.
The positive view of this strategy was that Intel grew the overall market for PCs; the dark side was that they prevented any competitor achieving a dominant position in any technology that might have threatened their dominance of the PC hardware. Thus, Intel could not afford for IBM's microchannel bus to prevail, not just as a competing nexus of the PC platform but also because IBM had no interest in providing the bandwidth needed for the PC to compete with high-end systems. The effect in strategic terms is somewhat similar to the old Roman practice of demolishing all dwellings and cutting down all trees close to their roads or their castles. No competing structure may be allowed near Intel's platform; it must all be levelled into a commons. But a nice, orderly, well-regulated commons: interfaces should be `open but not free'.
The consortium approach has evolved into a highly effective way of skirting antitrust law. So far, the authories do not seem to have been worried about such consortia - so long as the standards are open and accessible to all companies. They may need to become slightly more sophisticated.
Of course, if Fritz Hollings manages to get his bill through Congress, then TCPA will become compulsory and the antitrust issue will fall away, at least in America. Once may hope that European regulators will have more backbone.
21. When is this going to hit the streets?
It has. The specification was published in 2000. Atmel is already selling a Fritz chip, and although you need to sign a non-disclosure agreement to get a data sheet, you have been able to buy it installed in the IBM Thinkpad series of laptops since May 2002. Some of the existing features in Windows XP and the X-Box are TCPA features: for example, if you change your PC configuration more than a little, you have to reregister all your software with Redmond. Also, since Windows 2000, Microsoft has been working on certifying all device drivers: if you try to load an unsigned driver, XP will complain. There is also growing US government interest in the technical standardisation process. The train is rolling.
The timing of Palladium is less certain. There appears to be a power struggle going on between Microsoft and Intel; Palladium will also run on competing hardware from suppliers such as Wave Systems, and applications written to run on top of vanilla TCPA will need to be rewritten to run on Palladium. This seems a play to ensure that the secure computing platform of the future is controlled by Microsoft alone. It might also be a tactic to deter other companies from trying to develop software platforms based on TCPA. Intel and AMD appear to plan for the second generation of TCPA functionality to be provided in the main processor for free. This might provide higher security, but would enable them to control developments rather than Microsoft.
I do know that the Palladium announcement was brought forward by over a month after I presented a paper at a conference on Open Source Software Economics on the 20th June. This paper criticised TCPA as anticompetitive, as amply confirmed by new revelations since.
22. What's TORA BORA?
This seems to have been an internal Microsoft joke: see the Palladium announcement. The idea is that `Trusted Operating Root Architecture' (Palladium) will stop the `Break Once Run Anywhere' attack, by which they mean that pirated content, once unprotected, can be posted to the net and used by anyone.
They seem to have realised since that this joke might be thought to be in bad taste. At a talk I attended on the 10th July at Microsoft Research, the slogan had changed to `BORE-resistance', where BORE standards for `Break Once Run Everywhere'. (By the way, the speaker there described copyright watermarking as `content screening', a term that used to refer to stopping minors seeing pornography: the PR machine is obviously twitching! He also told us that it would not work unless everyone used a trusted operating system. When I asked him whether this meant getting rid of linux he replied that linux users would have to be made to use content screening.)
23. But isn't PC security a good thing?
The question is: security for whom? You might prefer not to have to worry about viruses, but neither TCPA nor Palladium will fix that: viruses exploit the way software applications (such as Microsoft Office and Outlook) use scripting. You might get annoyed by spam, but that won't get fixed either. (Microsoft implies that it will be fixed, by filtering out all unsigned messages - but the spammers will just buy TCPA PCs. You'd be better off using your existing mail client to filter out mail from people you don't know and putting it in a folder you scan briefly once a day.) You might be worried about privacy, but neither TCPA nor Palladium will fix that; almost all privacy violations result from the abuse of authorised access, often obtained by coercing consent. The medical insurance company that requires you to consent to your data being shared with your employer and with anyone else they can sell it to, isn't going to stop just because their PCs are now officially `secure'. On the contrary, they are likely to sell it even more widely, because computers are now `trusted'.
Economists have noted that when a manufacturer makes a `green' product available, it often increases pollution, as people buy green rather than buying less; we may see a security equivalent of this `social choice trap', as it's called. In addition, by entrenching and expanding monopolies, TCPA will increase the incentives to price discriminate and thus to harvest personal data for profiling.
The most charitable view of TCPA is put forward by a Microsoft researcher: there are some applications in which you want to constrain the user's actions. For example, you want to stop people fiddling with the odometer on a car before they sell it. Similarly, if you want to do DRM on a PC then you need to treat the user as the enemy.
Seen in these terms, TCPA and Palladium do not so much provide security for the user as for the PC vendor, the software supplier, and the content industry. They do not add value for the user, but destroy it. They constrain what you can do with your PC in order to enable application and service vendors to extract more money from you. This is the classic definition of an exploitative cartel - an industry agreement that changes the terms of trade so as to diminish consumer surplus.
No doubt Palladium will be bundled with new features so that the package as a whole appears to add value in the short term, but the long-term economic, social and legal implications require serious thought.
24. So why is this called `Trusted Computing'? I don't see why I should trust it at all!
It's almost an in-joke. In the US Department of Defense, a `trusted system or component' is defined as `one which can break the security policy'. This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but just stop to think about it. The mail guard or firewall that stands between a Secret and a Top Secret system can - if it fails - break the security policy that mail should only ever flow from Secret to Top Secret, but never in the other direction. It is therefore trusted to enforce the information flow policy.
Or take a civilian example: suppose you trust your doctor to keep your medical records private. This means that he has access to your records, so he could leak them to the press if he were careless or malicious. You don't trust me to keep your medical records, because I don't have them; regardless of whether I like you or hate you, I can't do anything to affect your policy that your medical records should be confidential. Your doctor can, though; and the fact that he is in a position to harm you is really what is meant (at a system level) when you say that you trust him. You may have a warm feeling about him, or you may just have to trust him because he is the only doctor on the island where you live; no matter, the DoD definition strips away these fuzzy, emotional aspects of `trust' (that can confuse people).
Remember during the late 1990s, as people debated government control over cryptography, Al Gore proposed a `Trusted Third Party' - a service that would keep a copy of your decryption key safe, just in case you (or the FBI, or the NSA) ever needed it. The name was derided as the sort of marketing exercise that saw the Russian colony of East Germany called a `Democratic Republic'. But it really does chime with DoD thinking. A Trusted Third Party is a third party that can break your security policy.
25. So a `Trusted Computer' is one that can break my security?
Now you've got it.
[B]簡單翻譯[/B]
一、 什麼是 TCPA，什麼又是 Palladium？
答： TCPA 是 Trusted Computing Platform Alliance 的縮寫，由 Intel 公司發起的一個組織。該組織的目標是致力於促成新一代具有安全、信任能力的硬體運算平台。而 Palladium 是微軟新一代的作業系統裡的計劃之一，這個計劃可以運用 TCPA 的平台來具體實現所謂的保防功能。
二、 請用白話來說清楚，倒底 TCPA/Palladium 是在幹嘛？
答： 最明顯的用途，是把「版權控管保護」手段，簡稱DRM，做進你的個人電腦裡，無處不在。包括你自己打的 Microsoft 文件，全部被這套完美計劃給加密了。就好比美國片商把 DVD 片用 CSS 來保護一樣。只是，這回做進電腦裡去了。藉由它，唱片音樂公司可以賣給你「只能播放三次」或是「只能在你生日播放」的 CD 。所有一切想得到的智財產品行銷包裝手法，都將會發生。
TCPA/Palladium 會讓你難以使用未經授權的軟體，盜版軟體可以在遠端被偵測並且移除它。它也可以讓使用租賃軟體的計價變得方便好用。比爾蓋玆早就夢想著如何讓中國人民付錢給微軟， TCPA/Palladium 正是夢的實現。
還有很多其它的可能性…政府可以讓公務人員所處理的機密性文件無法給新聞媒體開啟解讀；拍賣網站可以限制你必須從它們所信任的代理伺服器上來競標，你再也無法在競標過程裡耍小聰明；想在電腦遊戲裡作弊？難上加難。
除了這些正面的規範性用途，也是有黑暗面的手段：遠端督查、刪除盜版音樂軟體的功能，也可以被檢警甚至是軟體設計公司自己拿來刪除他們認為具有威脅性的文件。這些文件可以是政府認定的成人色情甚或是政治批評。軟體設計公司也可以設計出你難以擺脫換用的軟體產品；例如 MS Office Word 可以把你打的文件統統以只有微軟有金鑰可打開的加密方法來加密。你再也無法買同樣功能的其它廠商產品來編輯明明是自己打的文件。
三、 所以…偶以後再也不能在偶的電腦播放 MP3 囉？
答： 若你是今年以前下載來的 MP3 ，還可以用一陣子沒有問題。微軟說 Palladium 不會一下子突然讓所有事情停止運作。畢竟青蛙得慢慢煮熟。然而從最近的 Windows Media Player 更新程式卻引起了爭議，要求想更新的使用者同意新的防盜版手段，默認微軟有權刪除、停用你電腦中的盜版檔案。
你可以使用一些非微軟出器的播放器，如 VMWare, Total Recoder 來保有對自已 PC 的完全控制權，但是這些它牌播放器，將來很可能無法播放授權過的智財檔案。
各種應用程式可以決定如何使用程式自己所開啟的檔案，只要有個遠端連線的管制伺服器。因此，Media Player 會自行決定開啟受保護文件的條件。我們可以期待，微軟會提出一切的絛件來找內容產製業者來談合作關係，從此實現所有可能的 Business Model。你可以用三分之一價錢來買到正版 CD，但也只聽三次；受不了？再付剩下的三分之二，你買同一張 CD 突然就可以一直聽。
真好不是麼？花小錢先試用，滿意再付款。然後，你將你的那張正版 CD 借給朋友一起分享你的滿意。結果，你的朋友家中的機器完全無法播放，拿回你家又可以了。和這個相比，DVD 的區碼分別制度，還算好的。
這樣的例子在今天已經可以辦得到了，微軟只要下載一個補丁到你的電腦即可。但是只要 TCPA/Palladium 可以讓人們難以破解或逃離控制，微軟就可以更容易地控制用戶端的昇級和補丁過程。這個結果，對生意人是致命的吸引力。
四、 啊它是怎麼辦到的？
答： TCPA 提供了硬體保全監控（就是無法由 user 關閉）的晶片功能，讓作業系統使用。目前的實際成品，初步會開發出一塊叫做 Fritz 的晶片，放在主機板上。最後的目標，是……放在 CPU 裡，讓你想拔都拔不掉。
你一開機， Fritz 安全運算老大接管一切。它老大從機板的唯讀記憶體中叫出執行碼來開始運作，然後檢查並載入作業系統，衡量整個系統的狀態後是否如它所預期，於焉開始正式作分分秒秒的「保全監控」。
一些這裡面的術語，會談到所謂「可以信任的」、「可以驗証的」，這些安全觀念會慢慢地滲透到所有操作電腦的方式。藉由一個記錄硬體（例如音效卡、影像卡、網路卡）和軟體（作業系統、驅動程式）的內建資料表，來清點一切。
Fritz 會以此來檢查硬體是否在 TCPA 認可的清單中，這清單已經簽署進軟體的元件裡。若有任何異動，Fritz 老大會跳出來要求認證授權（意思就是你要從口袋或信用卡掏錢出來買授權）；否則你別玩了，再怎麼點爛你的滑鼠左鍵，檔案就是加密混碼過的，永遠打不開。
結果就是，在 Palladium 上面跑的應用軟體可以實施非常有力的版權控制。意即，靠 Fritz 老大加上 Palladium，你的 PC 打通軟體硬體在保全功能上的任督二脈；一齊來向你討債了。
只要你電腦跑 Palladim 加上 Fritz 老大，順利開機完成，你的電腦就是一台印有中華民國身分証唯一流水號的電腦， Fritz 老大會私下跑去跟所謂的第三者公司，就是 Disney 大哥大、夢工廠大哥大大以及寶麗金滾石大大哥等眾兄弟們好好溝通「認證」一番。主人有繳錢的 Fritz 就會是可這些大哥大們所信任的、播放軟體可驗証的消費電腦哦。
至於繳錢方式，嗯，請放心，那只是任何商業模式加上想像力發揮而已；有非常多的 MBA 畢業的行銷人員會為你設計貼心的購買付費套餐辦法。
五、 汗||| 這麼神奇的 TCPA/Palladium 還可以拿來做別的嗎？
答： 可以。
TCPA/Palladium 可以讓你跟情婦或是客兄的往來書信統統上鎖加密，讓你的原配老公在要求離婚賠償時，怎麼都提不出呈堂証供的情書。
這叫做「強制性存取檔案保全手段」Mandatory Access Control。其實，就跟迪士尼不希望你很方便地按兩下就看到花木蘭卡通是一樣的。微軟宣稱，它們會在 Palladium 上，一定會提供各位偷情者這一個保全功能。爾魯且還是 very user friendly 哦~~~
做黑的公司或個人，就可以用這個來防止抓耙子，他們會讓他們能做涉法証據的文件變成只有特定機器或人員可以閱讀；也可以為這些文件加上時間鎖，時間一到，就像不可能的任務，文件使用過後自動銷毀。（想想這功能對做假帳的公司、恩龍、甚至是微軟自己在面對反托辣斯訴訟時，湮滅証據文件多有用）話說回來，從此幹徵信社和跑新聞的，可就辛苦了（不過又有一說，國安局、地檢署的人，可能會擁有開啟進入所有加密檔案的後門主鑰，不然，賣搖頭丸的帳本，也無法做為呈堂証供，控方可就糗了）
另外，TCPA/Palladium 電子付款機制裡，也可以它一展身手的地方。微軟的一個願景是讓銀行的金融信用卡上的功能，從此移轉到它所開發的應用軟體上使用。如果我們將來線上的所有交易買賣，都必須經由微軟的這一套驗証機制，使得消費者不得不使用 TCPA/Palladium 系統，否則會非常的不便利的話；那即使一套失敗的商業模式，採用了微軟的交易系統，那它也變得非常有競爭力。
所以，為了國家安全、社會安全、身心安康，大家熱烈支持 TCPA/Palladium 吧！
六、 嗯，說得也是，這一切看來都有所得亦有所失，我很願意犧牲一些（費用…呵）來換取世界和平的。不過，Intel 跟 Microsoft 真的也像我一樣，是基於拯救世界的想法來開發出這神奇的 TCP/Palladium 嗎？他們賺到了什麼？
答： 偶有一個在英代爾棄暗投明的抓耙子朋友，在偶嚴刑拷打後，帶著嗚咽的嗓音告訴偶：「這一切都是出自於正當防衛…英代爾在電腦的中央處理器已經佔有現今絕大多數的市場了，鎯也削了不少。但是，今天PC市場已經很難再擴張了。可是英代爾又認為 PC 會是將來每個家庭裡所有家電設備的中央管制器 (HU 。要是，要是智慧財產商品是家庭的重要消費類別~抖~~那摸，TCPA 技術將是一個全新的市場！」
最後流下無法控制的口水……
我相信微軟也對擴張自己的帝國、納入娛樂業的版圖相當有興趣；即使沒有如此，若 TCPA/Palladium 能順利推廣，英代爾和微軟也有相當的硬體授權利潤和軟體正版銷售上揚的好機會。無法讓中國人付錢，是比爾蓋玆胸口中永遠的痛。
藉由 Palladium ，他可以針對每一個人的 PC 做 Office 授權，藉由 TCPA 他可以讓針對每一塊主機版來做 Windows 的授權。 TCPA/Palladium 還可以記錄流出的序號、非法產生的序號…
最後，藉由 TCPA/Palladium 加密技術，他可以讓消費者一旦使用微軟的產品後，付出很大的代價來轉換其它廠家的同功能產品。從此，消費者只有被迫不斷付費買升級版。
七、 啊咧，這麼炫的點子怎麼會給他們想到？
答： 這主意，最初是在 Bill Arbaugh 、Dave Farber 以及 Jonathan Smith 三個IEEE的工程師針對安全和隱私座談會裡的一篇文章中出現的。
這篇文章的構想，在2001年二月六號取得了美國專利，專利號碼 6185678。Jonathan 的想法是來自於他在劍橋時所完成的工作。
其基本觀念可以回溯到1970年代，美國軍方的安全系統工作方式：一個時時監督電腦存取過程的監控點名器 (Reference Monitor)。
八、 我想到從前有個叫 PIII 的CPU 內建序號耶。
答： Intel 在1997年開始了一個把 Fritz 晶片內建於CPU的計劃，最近2000年時，改叫獨立控制晶片計劃。把序號打進 CPU 只是這類陰謀的第一小步。但是大眾的負面反應，使得這一小步再也跨不下去，改採拉攏 Microsoft 等其它好兄弟一塊來排西瓜看誰大邊，講話大聲。
九、 這晶片為什麼叫做 "Fritz" ？
答： 是為了紀念並且彰顯來自南加洲參議員 Fritz Hollings 的榮耀。Fritz 參議員為了立法強制使 TCPA 變成所有家用電子產品基板的一部分，做了日夜匪懈的努力。實在非常令人欽佩與感激。所以英代爾採用他的名字來流芳百世。
十、 好，這麼說吧， TCPA 可以杜絕音樂的盜版，可以幫助我們機密文件不外洩。可是它也讓壞蛋的壞事無法外洩啊，除了盜版，它也帶來新的問題啊！
答： 有一些公司會袖手旁觀，例如，歐洲的 SmartCard 相關產業的公司。畢竟，要是Fritz 出現在筆記電腦、PDA和手機上面…那可是對他們相當大的傷害。事實上，若 Fritz 成功了，這類保安產業的公司，會全部昏倒。
如微軟宣稱 TCPA/Palladium 技術可以阻止病毒蔓延散布、大量惡意的廣告信無法得逞，還有一切一切網路世界的壞事統統消失…倘若真如此，那趨勢科技、諾頓先生，靠發廣告信的小公司、防火牆製造商，一覺醒來會發覺原本的早餐給 Wintel 吃了。
也有關於資訊內容商品和資訊服務產業創新的議題，原有的公司會因此更鞏固他們的主導地位，這方面的討論在傑出的經濟學家 Hal Varian 的文章中有說明。
除此之外，有更進一步的問題存在：誰掌控了此類安全保防晶片，如 Fritz ，誰就真正掌握了資訊流通的權力！
有太多的方法可以濫用這種晶片，發展權力。但是…英代爾公司拒絕發表 TCPA 組織在這方面的意見。
十一、 TCPA 會如何被誤用呢？
答： 若是有軟體使用了 TCPA/Palladium 提供的功能，就拿Winodws Media Player 和 Word 來說好了，它們在存取功能上就會受到遠端伺服器的操控，這伺服器有著最終決定權的黑名單，靠這些客戶端的應用程式不時地檢查你機器上的合法非法檔案這樣，智財擁有者才能對每一分文件做出新的售價管理動作。盜版軟體一旦企圖在此種機器運作，會立刻被發覺。你只能在自己的機器使用智財商品，傳送到其它的機器毫無用處。
或許中國人會用無 TCPA 功能的普通電腦來執行無 Palladium 內建的軟體來執行軟體的操作來產製文件，但是這些化外電腦所產製的文件，會被 TCPA 電腦拒絕。
哇，架恐布？不止如此，從商業上的強凌弱、政治上的言論檢查到經濟生活福利。
我相信，這些恐布事件會一步一步慢慢藉由 TCPA/Palladium 來實現。
首先，出於善意的檢警會要求禁止並起訴幼童色情產業、想要破獲反政府組織；於是所有的 TCPA/Palladium 機器會自行刪除甚至舉報電腦裡是否有此類文件。
然後關於智慧財產權的訴訟會要求管制爭議性的文件；如「山達基教」Scientology 試著禁止對它不利的 Fishman 証詞。只要律師和檢警發覺 TCPA/Palladium 技術是如此立即有效，濫用它的行為會蔚為風潮。
從古騰堡的活字印刷發明時起，現代文明才油然而生。因為資訊藉著活字印刷技術得以便宜方便地保存和流通，即使教宗和君主想要禁止他們認為的不當言論。例如，西元1380年的 Wycliffe 將聖經譯成英文後，當權者欲禁止他發起的羅拉德教派(Lollard)，執行的非常順利，但是當西元1524年的 Tyndale 將新約聖經譯出後，雖然他立刻遭到焚死，但已經印刷流通出五萬分以上的新約。中古歐洲的體制於焉瓦解，現代文明由然而興。現在嘗試控制資訊流通的社會共產主義者愈來愈難以施力，在蘇聯瓦解後，民主式的自由資本主義獲得勝利。
但是現在，TCPA/Palladium 已經對古騰堡留我們的重要遺產帶來了威脅：電子文件，一旦產製問世，將輕易地被政府的法院命令收回銷毀。
在蘇聯嘗試為每一台打字機和傳真機刻上序號管制之後，TCPA 嘗試為所有的電腦註冊；自由、民主與公義亦因此有侵害之虞。
十二、 有點恐布了。但是我們不能把這晶片關掉功能嗎？按一下就給它 power off。
答： 當然可以，TCPA 有一個功能可以讓使用者把它關掉。可是微軟賣給你的內建配合 TCPA 的軟體，仍然要求要它 ON 才肯運作，否則，你關了TCPA，也關掉自己Word, Windows Media 的軟體使用權。
更重要的是，你即使關掉了 Fritz 晶片功能，仍然有一樣你關不掉的，檢查盜版軟體。它還是會依據黑名單來清查目前的作業系統序號。這涉及了國際主權問題。如果伊拉克的海珊笨到用 TCPA 電腦，那美國人就有辦法查出他的視窗序號，然後，利用 TCPA/Palladium 關掉它，接下來就是戰爭！不過，我想，我們大家都是普通人，不是小布希憎恨的對象，沒什麼關係，不必擔心被強制關機。
所以用非信任模式開機解決不了問題，你只有跑舊的 Win2000，甚至自己動手想辦法把 Fritz 晶片從主機板中隔離，同時又保持主機板正常。
哎呀，你想用 Linux 嗎~~是的，你可以。如果你保証你的朋友們完全不寄給你他們 TCPA 保密過的Word 文件，這文件簽署授權只給獨有的你，和你獨有的電腦，和你獨有的 Palladium + Word 才能開啟。同時，你也不看夢工廠出品精采鉅片，不聽布蘭妮周杰倫的歌，不在網路上購物，不用 Outlook 跟人通 Email…
而且，你的電腦螢幕看起來很醜很聳，桌布不是藍天白雲的高爾夫球場，音效很差，找不到我的最愛，用一個東西要開好多視窗，點十二下滑鼠…
