address@hidden: Re: Part 2: System Structure]

[Bas Wijnen]

As requested by Jonathan, here's his e-mail (and my answer) from yesterday.

----- Forwarded message from Bas Wijnen <address@hidden> -----

Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 19:19:58 +0200
From: Bas Wijnen <address@hidden>
To: "Jonathan S. Shapiro" <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: Part 2: System Structure

I suppose you meant to send this to the list?
I did already answer your question though. ;-)  If you use attestation, then
it will fail within a sub-Hurd.  And it should, too.  So if the program
insists on running on opaque memory, it will insist on not running inside a
sub-Hurd.  If we really want, we could make a special system-provided
sub-Hurd-on-opaque-memory which is trusted (and thus can work with
attestation).  Not that we want to support attestation in the Hurd, but you
might want to support sub-Hurd-like behaviour in Coyotos-OS.

Ps: If you did indeed mean to send this to the list, feel free to include this
reply.

On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 09:57:08AM -0400, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> > > ... the programmer is not an entity which needs protection by the system.
> > 
> > This is precisely the point on which we disagree. Some of the
> > applications that I have in mind are *exactly* applications where the
> > programmer's interests require protection by the system from the
> > administrator.
> 
> But he's not going to get it anyway.  If the system doesn't allow installing a
> wrapper to cheat the program, he can still alter the code before installing
> it. 
> 
> 
> I am assuming current (next week) generation hardware, which includes 
> attestation. Even if it only supplies secure storage, binary alteration can 
> be precluded.
> 
> shap

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