Posted on 04/25/2005 5:39:47 AM PDT by r5boston
After nearly a decade, Microsoft's vision for how to protect especially sensitive information within Windows remains largely that--a vision.
For years, the software giant has promised to deliver a secure way to shuttle around key bits of information. Once known as Palladium and more recently dubbed the Next Generation Secure Computing Base, or NGSCB, the approach was once a key part of Longhorn, the next version of Windows. Although the first piece of that is arriving in Longhorn, it's only a thin sliver of what Microsoft has been working toward since describing its idea of "trusted Windows" a decade ago.
In the next version of Windows, which Microsoft chairman Bill Gates will show off on Monday at a company sponsored conference, Microsoft will use the concepts of NGSCB to ensure that Windows-based machines start up without interference. The primary benefit of such an approach is that if a laptop is lost or stolen, the data can't be accessed simply by booting the machine up using another operating system.
"If you lose your laptop in a taxi, no one is going to get at your data," Windows chief Jim Allchin said in a recent interview. "The hardware is not going to let you boot that software, and there is a way for us to do full-volume encryption."
That may indeed be a popular feature, but it's a far cry from Microsoft's broader plan, which was to use NGSCB systemwide as a secure vault for particularly sensitive information such as passwords or bank records. Such information would be kept in hardware and then securely transmitted between a computer's components, such as memory, the hard drive and the monitor.
The change, Microsoft says, is the result of customers telling the software maker that they didn't want to have to rewrite their applications.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...
Strangely, things that make Bill Gates feel secure seem usually to have the opposite effect on me. Go figure.
Sounds like a good Visa commercial. ;-)
Bill finally found the way to hose up Linux, have his boys write code for it!
if they'd go back onto the unix platform,
like apple and linux,
they'd be there.
Well, that's the thing - that's a problem with pretty much any OS out there right now. If I have physical access or physical control of the machine, you're most likely going to be toast. Which is why I'm sort of curious to find out what Allchin thinks he has up his sleeve here.
"...data can't be accessed simply by booting the machine up using another operating system...the hardware is not going to let you boot that software,"
hmmmm maybe I'm misunderstanding something here [I hope] but is this suggesting MS wants 'secure computing' to mean you wont be able to install any other operating system such as Linux on a future 'secure computing' PC? Or wont be able to boot it if you do?? With HARDWARE to prevent that???
Or is this "secure computing" MS playing to some kind of RIAA/MPAA 'DRM' scheme i.e. "Windows Secure Computing has detected a security error...you have attempted to access an insecure media file without DRM protection by opening an insecure media player application other than Windows Media SecurePlayer...unauthorized application will now close and Windows will shut down to protect your system...please reboot your PC..."
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