Seth David Schoen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >You could conceivably have a PC where the developers don't trust Linus, but >instead trust the PC manufacturer. The PC manufacturer could have made it >extremely expensive for Linus to tamper with the PC in order to "violate [the >developers'] security model". (It isn't logically impossible, it's just >extremely expensive. Perhaps it costs millions of dollars, or something.)
Do you trust the PC manufacturer though? Let's assume: - The security target is DRM. - The users of the security are content providers. - The threat model/attackers are consumers. In other words the content providers have to trust the PC manufacturer to provide security to restrict what the consumer can do. The PC manufacturer's motivation though is to enhance their own revenue stream by selling as much hardware as they can, not to enhance the content provider's revenue stream by making it as crippled as they can. If you look at the DVD market, every DVD player made outside the US has some form of vulcan nerve pinch that you can apply that'll remove the enforcement of region coding. Depending on your country's view of differential pricing enforcement mechanisms, this may be enabled by default (I don't know if you can buy a DVD player in NZ that enforces region coding, if I was more of an enterpreneur I could start a good business exporting universal-region, universal-format players to the US :-), or at least will be a widely-known secret that everyone applies ten minutes after they first plug the device in. Given that the goals of the hardware vendor and the user (= content provider) are mutually exclusive, I wouldn't trust the hardware vendor. Conversely, as a consumer, I would trust the hardware vendor to provide backdoors to bypass the DRM in order to sell more units after the first year or two, when it's become a commodity and they need some other way of competing for sales than the novelty value. Peter. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
