Follow up. For those of you who are interested in reading more about how Itanium supports a secure platform you can read all about it at the US patent office number: US 2002/0194389 A1
Here's a snip from the abstract.. The combined-hardware-and-software secure-platform interface employs a hardware platform that provides at least four privilege levels, non-privileged instructions, non-privileged registers, privileged instructions, privileged registers, and firmware interfaces. The combined-hardware-and-software secure-platform interface conceals all privileged instructions, privileged registers, and firmware interfaces and privileged registers from direct access by operating systems and custom control programs, providing to the operating systems and custom control programs the non-privileged instructions and non-privileged registers provided by the hardware platform as well as a set of callable software services. The callable services provide a set of secure-platform management services for operational control of hardware resources that neither exposes privileged instructions, privileged registers, nor firmware interfaces of the hardware nor simulates privileged instructions and privileged registers. The callable services also provide a set of security-management services that employ internally generated secret data, each compartmentalized security-management service managing internal secret data without exposing the internal secret data to computational entities other than the security-management service itself. To solve the security problems you (us, whatever) will have to use a combination hardware and software architecture. Can't be done in software alone and it all has to start with Root Trust. If you don't have that then you have something "else". Cheers. Peter [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Peter J. Cranstone [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2005 1:12 PM To: dev@httpd.apache.org Subject: RE: pgp trust for https? No problem - Itanium has the architecture you need. You can isolate all the physical memory into compartments controlled by a protection key. Each compartment has the ability to individually control read, write and execute privileges. Peter [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Paul A Houle [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2005 1:07 PM To: dev@httpd.apache.org Subject: Re: pgp trust for https? Peter J. Cranstone wrote: >Currently Windows, Linux and Unix only use two levels of privilege - Ring 3 >and Ring 0. Everybody and there uncle's code want to run at Ring 0. Another >really bad idea, as once I introduce a network/video/keyboard/whatever >driver at that level I can execute malicious code. From there I can control >the machine. > > > You'd need a new hardware architecture for ring 1 drivers to be worth it. The trouble is that drivers can initiate DMA operations against physical memory. Unless you devise some system where the OS can veto DMA operations, protection in the CPU is worthless.
