We see here a difference between your and my sides of the Atlantic. Here in the US, almost no one has a smart card.
Of those cards you carry, how many are capable of doing public key operations? A simple memory smartcard doesn't count for what we were talking about. There are other problems with doing TCPA-like operations with a smartcard, but I didn't go into those. The biggest one to chew on is that I, the computer owner, need verification that my software is in good shape. My agent in my computer (presumably the smartcard) needs a way to examine the software state of my computer without relying on any of the software in my computer (which might have been corrupted, if the computer's S/W has been corrupted). This implies to me that my agent chip needs a H/W path for examining all the S/W of my computer. That's something the TPM gives us that a smartcard doesn't (when that smartcard goes through a normal device driver to access its machine). - Carl +------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://theworld.com/~cme | | PGP: 75C5 1814 C3E3 AAA7 3F31 47B9 73F1 7E3C 96E7 2B71 | +---Officer, arrest that man. He's whistling a copyrighted song.---+ > -----Original Message----- > From: Ben Laurie [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Friday, December 19, 2003 2:42 AM > To: Carl Ellison > Cc: 'Stefan Lucks'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: Difference between TCPA-Hardware and a smart > card (was: example: secure computing kernel needed) > > Carl Ellison wrote: > > It is an advantage for a TCPA-equipped platform, IMHO. > Smart cards cost > > money. Therefore, I am likely to have at most 1. > > If I glance quickly through my wallet, I find 7 smartcards > (all credit > cards). Plus the one in my phone makes 8. So, run that "at most 1" > argument past me again? > > Cheers, > > Ben. > > -- > http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/ > > "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he > doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff > --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
