On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 08:11:03PM +1000, 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.
This isn't so hypothetical. I ran into problems trying to install an
"unsanctioned" mini-pci wireless card in an IBM T30, only to find that
the BIOS refused to allow me to boot into an operating system until the
card was removed. I was not a happy camper. If IBM is willing to do
this at the BIOS level, what's to say that a video card manufacturer
isn't willing to do this for their MPEG/2 encoder (loadable) firmware?
Anyway, it sucks and it very non-free.
--
Chad Walstrom <chewie@wookimus.net> http://www.wookimus.net/
assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */
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