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June 10, 2005
More on Apple and non-portability
One thing that's worth noting about restricting people from running OS/X on generic PC hardware is that trusted computing technology is of fairly little use. It's certainly easy enough to arrange for a trusted computing module in all legitimate Apple computers but that doesn't buy you much, since it just amounts to the OS checking for the TC module, which is little better than serial number checks. The other alternative is to require part of the code to run in the TC module, perhaps by encrypting that section of code. However, then the attacker just reverse engineers that interface and replaces that section of the code. You could, of course, make the whole thing run in that kind of trusted hardware, but this isn't compatible with the general design of such systems which is to mate a general purpose CPU with small trusted computing base.Posted by ekr at June 10, 2005 11:31 AM | Filed under:
Comments
If you have to bypass TC, Apple might have the DMCA on their side and can keep things under the carpet. If they are smart, they don't care what people do in their basements, and only go after those who are stupid to post their findings to the Internet.
There's a small problem, though: VMware. VMware clearly has substantial noninfringing use, and I'm sure VMware will support Mac OS X/x86 as both a host and a guest system. How would you convince VMware to run MacOS X guests only on MacOS-X-capable hosts?
Posted by: Florian Weimer at June 10, 2005 2:09 PM