Wave Systems Corp. (fka WAVXQ)

[Smithereens]

Attested software;

Can applets or attested software be vulnerable to attacks;
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m7v74028n3885025/

This paper investigates the security of DRM applications in a relaxed scenario where users have larger purview. We present two attacks: abuse attack and injection attack where some reasonably authenticated software can be exploited for stealing protected contents. In the abuse attack, an attacker uses an authenticated debugger to monitor the internal state of a DRM application for the purpose of violating the access privilege in the application. In the injection attack, an adversary is able to make malicious modifications on an original DRM application at will. These two attacks demonstrate that it is not straightforward to impose DRM in a TPM-enabled system. To counter the attacks, we provide the OS-encapsulation scheme which ensures that only the genuine OS can start the DRM application. Our scheme is an enhancement of security for TPM-enabled DRM in a loose but more practical environment, where people are allowed to use the debugger, web browser, etc.