Criticism
For more, see Trusted Computing#Criticism.The group has faced widescale opposition from the free software community on the grounds that the technology they are developing has a negative impact on the users' privacy and can create customer lock-in, especially if it is used to create DRM applications. It has received criticism from the GNU/Linux and FreeBSD communities, as well as the software development community in general. Significant backlash amongst the Trusted Computing Group was present during Richard Stallman's speech at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in July 2006, in New York. Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation have also criticized the group publicly in other speeches. The criticism calls Trusted Computing "Treacherous Computing" instead and warns that vendors can lock out software that is not officially signed by specific vendors, rendering it unusable.
Privacy concerns with the TCG revolve around the fact that each TPM has a unique keypair, called the "endorsement key", that identifies the platform. In initial versions of the TPM (version 1.1), the TCG addressed privacy concerns by suggesting the use of a "Privacy CA" that could certify pseudonymous machine credentials. By having separate credentials for interacting with different parties, actions could not be linked, and so some level of privacy is provided. However, this requires trust in the Privacy CA, who could still link pseudonyms to the common, identifying machine credential. Since this left unresolved privacy concerns, version 1.2 of the TPM specification introduced "Direct anonymous attestation": a protocol based on the idea of a zero-knowledge proof which allows a TPM user to receive a certification in such a way that the Privacy CA would not be able to link requests to a single user or platform, while still being able to identify rogue TPMs.
Privacy concerns for TPM were heightened when Christopher Tarnovsky presented methods to access and compromise the Infineon TPM non-volatile memory capacity which contains user data at Black Hat 2010.
Read more about this topic: Trusted Computing Group
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Good criticism is very rare and always precious.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)