1. InfoconDB
  2. DEF CON
  3. DEF CON 10 (2002)
  4. Trusted Computing Platform Alliance: The mother(board) of All Big Brothers

Trusted Computing Platform Alliance: The mother(board) of All Big Brothers

Presented at DEF CON 10 (2002), Aug. 3, 2002, 4 p.m. (50 minutes)

The Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, which includes Intel, AMD, HP, Microsoft, and 180 additional PC platform product vendors, has been working in secrecy for 3 years to develop a chip which will begin shipping mounted on new PC motherboards starting early next year.

This tamper-resistant Trusted Platform Module (TPM) will enable operating system and application vendors to ensure that the owner of the motherboard will never again be able to copy data which the media corporations or members of the TCPA don't wish to see copied, or to utilize the TCPA's software applications without pay.

Lucky Green will explain the history of the TCPA and the alliance's efforts, identify the dominant players in the TCPA and their objectives, discuss how the members of the TCPA will be able to limit and control a user's activities by remote, show how TPM's might permit a software vendor to exploit a bug in the GNU General Public License (GPL) to defeat the GPL, and detail previously unthinkable software licensing schemes which the TCPA enables.

Lucky will then analyze the bill currently pending in the U.S. Congress (S. 2048 S.2048) that will make it illegal to sell PC hardware in the future that does not comply with the TCPA's specifications.


Presenters:

  • Lucky Green - Cypherpunks.to
    Lucky Green has been a long-time activist in the Cypherpunks cryptography advocacy movement. He is best known for his role in coordinating the reverse engineering and break of the GSM digital mobile telephony authentication and voice privacy systems, showing that the systems had been deliberately weakened in the interest of facilitating national intelligence collection. Lucky also FedEx'ed, at his own expense, crates of PGP source code books to Europe, becoming the first person to legally export PGP from the United States. Faced with a demonstration of its absurd position that it was legal to export books from the U.S., but not electronic copies of the source code contained within those books, the U.S. Government came under increasing pressure from industry and was forced to relax governmental controls on strong cryptography in January of 2000.

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