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

.

Posted on 14 January 2003 by

Virus Bulletin