Ross Trustworthy Hardware

`Trusted Computing' Frequently Asked Questions - TC / TCG / LaGrande / NGSCB / Longhorn / Palladium / TCPA Version 1.1 (August 2003) This document is released under the GNU Free Documentation License. Here are links to translations into German , Dutch, Chinese, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Greek, Hebrew and . See also the which gives a lot of background to the issues raised here. 1. What is TC - this `trusted computing' business? The (TCG) is an alliance of Microsoft, Intel, IBM, HP and AMD which promotes a standard for a `more secure' PC. Their definition of `security' is controversial; machines built according to their specification will be more trustworthy from the point of view of software vendors and the content industry, but will be less trustworthy from the point of view of their owners. In effect, the TCG specification will transfer the ultimate control of your PC from you to whoever wrote the software it happens to be running. (Yes, even more so than at present.) The TCG project is known by a number of names. `Trusted computing' was the original one, and is still used by IBM, while Microsoft calls it `trustworthy computing' and the Free Software Foundation calls it `treacherous computing'. Hereafter I'll just call it TC, which you can pronounce according to taste. Other names you may see include TCPA (TCG's nam...