Microsoft rights management
What digital and information rights management
may mean for the industry.
Microsoft is frequently accused of being a hive of lax security,
but the company has been very public over the last couple of years about
tightening up its code and creating a security-focused culture
at its headquarters in Redmond.
One aspect of this appears to be the company's plans for digital and
information rights management (DRM and IRM) - new versions of Office running
in a corporate environment with a Rights Management Server
allow people to do all sorts of interesting things, like sending
email that expires.
Virus Bulletin carried an article in the October 2003 issue of the magazine
on the challenges IRM presents to the anti-virus industry - it's
now available to read online.
For all this extra digital software protection to work well,
however, some help needs to be provided by Palladium, Microsoft's
foray into hardware-based trusted computing - a subject
that seems to have fallen out of the spotlight recently. Palladium was
originally touted as the end of spam and viruses - a view with which VB
did not wholly agree.
A quick look on the Microsoft website appears to have Palladium reborn
as the Next-Generation
Secure Computing Base. The idea is still the same though: hardware-based
software verification, a.k.a 'Trusted Computing' - about which you can read more
here.
14 January 2003
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