Staying In Control With Trusted Platform Modules

Steps Of Development

Escalation steps in security concepts (Source: Intel).

The current developments represent the latest steps in security efforts. In the beginning, solutions were based on software only, followed soon by isolated applications with their own safety hardware, such as Smartcards for bank account management.

The next step was a first draft of the TP modules, nowadays represented in an up-to-date form such as the "Fritz chip". The first hardware manufacturer using Trusted Computing hardware was IBM, equipping the ThinkPad T23 with an Infineon TP module.

The initial step beyond the original TPM concept was the introduction of the technology that goes by the names Execute Disable Bit (XD) on Intel, and Non Execute (NX) by AMD and Data Execution Protection (DEP) by Microsoft. It describes a technology dedicated to the problem of buffer overruns; memory areas assigned to programs are strictly separated from non-executable areas. However this feature must be supported both by the CPU, the operating system and applications. Suitable operating systems currently are Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP1, Microsoft Windows XP SP2, Windows XP Professional x64, SUSE Linux 9.2 and Enterprise Linux 3 update 3.