News Microsoft's plan to make a DRM OS

[igor_kavinski]

The Microsoft Secure PC: MS patents a lock-down OS

Denial of Sharing attack

www.theregister.com

Microsoft Digital Rights Management Operating System - US Patent No. 6,330,670 (cryptome.org)

A digital rights management operating system protects rights-managed data, such as downloaded content, from access by untrusted programs while the data is loaded into memory or on a page file as a result of the execution of a trusted application that accesses the memory. To protect the rights-managed data resident in memory, the digital rights management operating system refuses to load an untrusted program into memory while the trusted application is executing or removes the data from memory before loading the untrusted program. If the untrusted program executes at the operating system level, such as a debugger, the digital rights management operating system renounces a trusted identity created for it by the computer processor when the computer was booted. To protect the rights-managed data on the page file, the digital rights management operating system prohibits raw access to the page file, or erases the data from the page file before allowing such access. Alternatively, the digital rights management operating system can encrypt the rights-managed data prior to writing it to the page file. The digital rights management operating system also limits the functions the user can perform on the rights-managed data and the trusted application, and can provide a trusted clock used in place of the standard computer clock.

Sounds pretty draconian. Is this the real purpose of their Pluton security chip?

 

[Justinus]

A patent from over 20 years ago? For real?

 

[PingSpike]

Historically, Microsoft was trying to roll something out like this for Vista. I can't remember the name of it...palladium maybe? It eventually got watered down to HDMI HDCP, probably due to technical limitations at the time combined with blowback. So I'd imagine the initial filing would be related to their first effort. It's certainly prescient now as Windows 11 is pushing the tight lockdown of OS harder.

 

[Hotrod2go]

More power to our tech oligarchs!

 

[TheELF]

The Microsoft Secure PC: MS patents a lock-down OS

Denial of Sharing attack

www.theregister.com

Microsoft Digital Rights Management Operating System - US Patent No. 6,330,670 (cryptome.org)



Sounds pretty draconian. Is this the real purpose of their Pluton security chip?

What's so draconian about it? Consoles have been doing this for years now, and not just while playing drm protected things but all of the time...
You can run all the untrusted software that you want any time you don't watch anything protected so what's the problem?
You will still be able to download all your illegal content from the interwebs.
This is absolutely necessary if MS wants to attract streaming services to windows (both movies and games) .

 

[VirtualLarry]

"Andrew Orlowski Thu 13 Dec 2001"

Sorry mods, just intended to quote the byline of the article in the OP, to point out that this was not new news.

I apologize that my copy + paste somehow created a link on the forums; that link was un-intentional.