Relationship good more recently than that. Geoffrey Strongin is in tune with Wave at a deeply philosophical level. He was even proposing to write a Bill of Rights for Cyberspace based on the technology. So I don't think there's much to worry about there.
BUT, I'm not sure where you anticipate them working together, other than on another reference design and through various committees. It would be great to hear redbeard's commentary on this subject.
AMD's FORTHCOMING Opteron processor will support Microsoft's trusty "security" initiative, Palladium, reports reveal.
Company spokesman Patrick Moorhead says the chip will refuse to play some content if it is not digitally signed by Microsoft, or some other Internet policeman, Australian publication The Age reveals.
Both AMD and Microsoft are members of the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), a body set up essentially to ensure the management of digital rights to content appearing on the Interweb. As such they are committed to the development of some DRM system to protect digital content from theft
Moorhead, however, says the user "unfairly branded" as a thief. He suggests most people would prefer to buy content online but the actions of increasingly paranoid film and music companies are preventing them form doing so.
AMD has been working on a "Trusted Client reference platform" with Wave Systems Corporation and produced a white paper (pdf) outlining their aims some time ago. The paper discusses how Wave's Embassy Trusted Client system would be intgrated into AMD's Athlon motherboard reference designs.
According to Juarez, Intel and AMD are among several microprocessor vendors participating with Microsoft in developing Palladium-aware products. Juarez says several dozen other companies have been contacted to participate. National Semiconductor, which was the first company to publicly announce the manufacture of a TPM, is "fully supporting Palladium from a hardware perspective," according to a company spokeswoman. She declined to comment further, citing NDA restrictions with Microsoft.
Members of the Palladium alliance described their efforts as necessary. "The TCPA's been around for a while; there have been a million press releases, but no one's really cared about it," said a spokesman for Intel, which declined to make an executive available to address Palladium questions. For his part, AMD's Strongin said that before Microsoft approached, his company had been working independently to extend the TCPA/TPM model.
The biggest single difference between TCPA and Palladium, according to Strongin, is that in Palladium, trusted processing takes place on the main CPU. Strongin declined to discuss any details of a redesign, but said the "differences between what's in microcode and what's not in microcode is not a terribly important one—it's a behavioral effect."
"There will be new modes and new instructions," Strongin said. "'Extensions' is a better term." AMD currently uses a set of instructions called 3DNow! to accelerate 3-D and other multimedia functions.
The Palladium component will leverage AMD's work on the TPM, according to Strongin, who added that AMD would probably license the component to other chipset manufacturers. "We also look to the infrastructure [providers] to provide support for this," Strongin continued.
Wave Systems Corp. was involved with both the design of the National SafeKeeper TPM component and with the International Security Trust & Privacy Alliance (http://www.istpa.org/). The alliance released an open, policy-configurable framework in late May. Representatives of Wave Systems were unavailable for comment and the ISTPA's director, Kevin O'Neill, declined to comment on Palladium.
AMD's Strongin said its Palladium component was done entirely in-house, and that the development was "fairly mature". He would not say when the chip would be brought to market, however. "We'll be there when we're needed to be," Strongin said.
Security Measures
Microsoft has been sharpening its focus on security all year. In an internal memo sent to all Microsoft employees in January, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates called for a sweeping shift in Microsoft's company focus, toward better security. The contents of the memo were covered by PC Magazine's sister publication eWeek. In addition to several security-related announcements, Microsoft has, in recent months, been pushing forward with a broad-based plan for protecting online identities, although its Passport technology has raised privacy concerns.
Currently, some of the issues surrounding Palladium—how digital-rights management will be applied to e-mail and media files, Palladium's apparent ability to block spam, and the reaction of the public and of PC and consumer-electronics companies—are simply not known. Executives said they've tried to factor in all of these concerns in what will undoubtedly be an intensely sensitive issue.
Privacy is a top concern of the Palladium initiative, AMD's Strongin said. When Intel tried to place a unique identification string within its Pentium CPUs, privacy advocates were outraged about the ability this could give a Web site to discover exactly who was accessing it, rather than to get only a semi-anonymous IP address.
Strongin originally said that the Palladium policy would be opt-out rather than opt-in, but changed his stance when asked for clarification. "We're neutral on opt-in or opt-out," he said. "It's very fundamentally different than when the Pentium processor contained a serial number that was open and accessible. [In Palladium], when you have things turned on, any ID is cryptographically protected and is not identifiable to the Web."
But Strongin also said he hoped that security and privacy were not mutually exclusive. AMD is a member of the ISTPA, he said. "We are extraordinarily sensitive to privacy issues, and the missteps in this space," he said. "All that is forewarned and forearmed….When you turn cookies off you have a lousy Web browsing experience. The key is to have cookies on, have good privacy, and be protected from attacks that exploit cookies."
Additionally, Microsoft has been involved in the TCPA, along with partners such as Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Intel, for several years. According to the mission statement posted at the TCPA Web site (www.trustedcomputing.org), the alliance's goal is to "drive and implement TCPA specifications for an enhanced HW- and OS- based trusted computing platform that implements trust into client, server, networking, and communication platforms." There are over 170 member companies in the TCPA.
Microsoft's Juarez is quick to emphasize, though, that Palladium is much more of a long-term effort for the company than anything that's gone before. "This is not TCPA," says Juarez. "This is a forward-looking thing that's very much designed to meet needs tomorrow, as the world becomes more interconnected. This initiative won't reach full steam tomorrow or next year, but Palladium will be built into a future version of Windows. It's too early to say specifically when that will happen." Juarez also says Microsoft continues to believe in the goals of the TCPA, and characterizes Palladium as a complementary effort.
And AMD's Strongin says, "We think we're raising the bar on security, not lowering the bar on privacy."
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