Re: Mass bug filing: Cryptographic protection against modification

[Glenn Maynard <g_deb@zewt.org>]

I suppose one of the more interesting responses to a troll (the initial
poster) is to sneak and turn it into a real discussion ...

On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 02:34:24PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > > Herbert Xu wrote:
> > > > Consider the hypothetical case of a piece of firmware for a peripheral
> > > > device that is protected by a cryptographic signature such that the
> > > > device will reject anything that is not signed using a specific key.
> 
> Such devices exist.

Gaming consoles commonly do: I believe the Xbox does this for all software,
and the Dreamcast does something like it for at least part of the bootloader
(though not cryptographally-based, I think), to prevent removing the initial
animation and sound.

-- 
Glenn Maynard