[IETF-IDRM] [IDRM] Fwd: MS Patent for DRM OS

[Thomas Hardjono]

Status:  U
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 23:16:44 -0800
To: cypherpunks@lne.com
From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Subject: MS Patent for DRM OS
Sender: owner-cypherpunks@lne.com

Microsoft's patent for a Digital Rights Management
Operating System was awarded yesterday:

   http://cryptome.org/ms-drm-os.htm

Abstract

A digital rights management operating system
protects rights-managed data, such as downloaded
content, from access by untrusted programs while
the data is loaded into memory or on a page file
as a result of the execution of a trusted application
that accesses the memory. To protect the
rights-managed data resident in memory, the
digital rights management operating system refuses
to load an untrusted program into memory while the
trusted application is executing or removes the data
from memory before loading the untrusted program.
If the untrusted program executes at the operating
system level, such as a debugger, the digital rights
management operating system renounces a trusted
identity created for it by the computer processor
when the computer was booted. To protect the
rights-managed data on the page file, the digital
rights management operating system prohibits raw
access to the page file, or erases the data from
the page file before allowing such access.
Alternatively, the digital rights management
operating system can encrypt the rights-managed
data prior to writing it to the page file. The
digital rights management operating system also
limits the functions the user can perform on the
rights-managed data and the trusted application,
and can provide a trusted clock used in place of
the standard computer clock.

--- end forwarded text