Two-way MMDS. With a codec, we could beam MPEG-2 from home. We could all be on Larry King (or on FredE's PC late at night). Intel's main concern is the security of digital content......
eet.com
Security tops Intel's priority list
By David Lammers
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. - Intel Corp. put data encryption and digital
content protection at the top of its priority lists at the Intel Developer Forum
(IDF) here this week.
Pat Gelsinger, vice president in charge of desktop platforms, said the
digital-transmission-content-protection (DTCP) initiative has received
support from both the Japanese and U.S. governments, and licensing to
OEMs is ready to begin. The approach ensures that digital content which
moves from one piece of hardware to another is copy-protected, and
complements the content-scrambling approach adopted by the DVD
industry.
Digital content protection is key to moving the 1394 interface forward, first
in digital-consumer products and later in 1394-enabled personal computers,
Intel said. Intel will build 1394 support into its chip sets within the next 18
months, Gelsinger said in a keynote address at IDF on Thursday.
Building in 1394, and convincing desktop OEMs to build out the ISA bus
and internal PCI slots, is central to Intel's vision of where the PC industry
needs to go to improve ease of use. Dan Russell, director of platform
marketing, claimed that the cost of implementing the 1394 bus - in terms
of gates, board space and dollars - is about equal to today's cost of
adding in the legacy ISA bus.
Next year, Intel intends to build hardware support for data security into its
CPUs and chip sets - including flash-based BIOS chips. Random-number
generators, digital signatures, monotonic counters and other
hardware-based security measures will be supported in logic primitives on
silicon.
A senior design manager at Dell Computer Corp. (Austin, Texas) said the
Intel approach to security has been discussed for the past year, but "things
have gotten bogged down over the past few months. You have to bring
together the content providers, the applications, so many different elements.
It just takes a lot of time."
Bringing together disparate interest groups to rally around Intel's approach
to the desktop is what IDF is all about. Gelsinger said, "we either cooperate
or die," and no issues have been more contentious than digital-content
protection and data encryption.
Jim Pappas, director of technology initiatives, said the digital-content
licensing authority is now ready to begin licensing the
digital-transmission-copy-protection keys for authoring and distribution.
Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) approved the
key for export in mid-August. The U.S. Department of Commerce also has
granted a class license so that individual companies need not apply for
export licenses when they ship equipment that incorporates the DTCP
encryption keys.
Stephen Balogh, strategic technology manager for platform marketing, has
been named acting president of the digital-content licensing authority
(DCLA). The initial version is called the 5C DTCP (five companies
digital-transmission-content-protection) package. Besides Intel, the
companies include Hitachi Ltd., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Sony
and Toshiba Corp. The DCLA will license the key on a "reasonable-fee"
basis, Balogh said, declining to be more specific.
The 5C DTCP approach is based on Hitachi's M6 common key-block
cipher, which is a block-encryption algorithm for digital content, and the
elliptical-curve digital-signal algorithm (ECDSA) for authentication.
"Companies can implement 5C DTCP on existing systems today,
independent of what is happening on the personal-computer platform. The
FCC's mandate to move digital TV forward means that we have the TV
industry clamoring for this technology. They need it now, so that DTVs can
be hooked up to set-top boxes. This initiative brings together all of the
consumer makers, Hollywood and the IT community," Balogh said.
At IDF, partic-ipants attended classes on how to implement the DTCP
approach on systems.
In an interview, Gelsinger said, "In the data-security area, we want to get
these message out early about why we believe that hardware support is a
better way. We are not ready to train people, and we don't have actual
products to announce. But we do believe that hardware primitives are better
at generating truly random numbers, and we want to lay out our hardware
and software primitives."
But as the Dell manager said, getting support for Intel's data-security
approach has been difficult, and another attendee said "it is a bit like herding
cats."
Security of course is essential to Intel's long-term vision of a billion
connected computers doing electronic commerce and other forms of
communication. Craig Barrett, in his first-day keynote address, said the
billion-connected-computer level will come "in six, eight or 10 years." There
are about 150 million computers in operation today, 300 million will be in
use by the end of the century and by 2005 a billion may be "interacting in an
instant fashion," Barrett said. The CDSA (common data-security
architecture), and hardware support for data encryption, are needed to
keep momentum going in the industry.
"We want the industry to move toward three things: easy to use; instantly
available; and always connected," Barrett said. |
