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Technology developed and promoted by the Trusted Computing Group

Trusted Computing (TC) is a technology developed and promoted by the Trusted Computing Group. The term is taken from the field of trusted systems and has a specialized meaning that is distinct from the field of confidential computing. With Trusted Computing, the computer will consistently behave in expected ways, and those behaviors will be enforced by computer hardware and software. and certain scholarly articles to use scare quotes when referring to the technology. Trusted Computing proponents such as International Data Corporation, the Enterprise Strategy Group and Endpoint Technologies Associates state that the technology will make computers safer, less prone to viruses and malware, and thus more reliable from an end user perspective. They also state that Trusted Computing will allow computers and servers to offer improved computer security over that which is currently available. Opponents often state that this technology will be used primarily to enforce digital rights management policies (imposed restrictions to the owner) and not to increase computer security. The U. S. Army requires that every new PC it purchases comes with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). As of July 3, 2007, so does virtually the entire United States Department of Defense.

The endorsement key is a 2048 bit RSA public and private key pair that is created randomly on the chip at manufacture time and cannot be changed. The private key never leaves the chip, while the public key is used for attestation and for encryption of sensitive data sent to the chip, as occurs during the TPM TakeOwnership command. This key is used to allow the execution of secure transactions: every Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is required to be able to sign a random number (in order to allow the owner to show that he has a genuine trusted computer), using a particular protocol created by the Trusted Computing Group (the direct anonymous attestation protocol) in order to ensure its compliance of the TCG standard and to prove its identity; this makes it impossible for a software TPM emulator with an untrusted endorsement key (for example, a self generated one) to start a secure transaction with a trusted entity. The TPM should be designed to make the extraction of this key by hardware analysis hard, but tamper resistance is not a strong requirement.

Memory curtaining extends common memory protection techniques to provide full isolation of sensitive areas of memory—for example, locations containing cryptographic keys. Even the operating system does not have full access to curtained memory. The exact implementation details are vendor specific.

Sealed storage protects private information by binding it to platform configuration information including the software and hardware being used. This means the data can be released only to a particular combination of software and hardware. Sealed storage can be used for DRM enforcing. For example, users who keep a song on their computer that has not been licensed to be listened will not be able to play it. Currently, a user can locate the song, listen to it, and send it to someone else, play it in the software of their choice, or back it up (and in some cases, use circumvention software to decrypt it). Alternatively, the user may use software to modify the operating system's DRM routines to have it leak the song data once, say, a temporary license was acquired. Using sealed storage, the song is securely encrypted using a key bound to the trusted platform module so that only the unmodified and untampered music player on his or her computer can play it. In this DRM architecture, this might also prevent people from listening to the song after buying a new computer, or upgrading parts of their current one, except after explicit permission of the vendor of the song.

Remote attestation allows changes to the user's computer to be detected by authorized parties. For example, software companies can identify unauthorized changes to software, including users modifying their software to circumvent commercial digital rights restrictions. It works by having the hardware generate a certificate stating what software is currently running. The computer can then present this certificate to a remote party to show that unaltered software is currently executing. Numerous remote attestation schemes have been proposed for various computer architectures, including Intel, RISC V, and ARM. Remote attestation is usually combined with public key encryption so that the information sent can only be read by the programs that requested the attestation, and not by an eavesdropper. To take the song example again, the user's music player software could send the song to other machines, but only if they could attest that they were running an authorized copy of the music player software. Combined with the other technologies, this provides a more restricted path for the music: encrypted I/O prevents the user from recording it as it is transmitted to the audio subsystem, memory locking prevents it from being dumped to regular disk files as it is being worked on, sealed storage curtails unauthorized access to it when saved to the hard drive, and remote attestation prevents unauthorized software from accessing the song even when it is used on other computers. To preserve the privacy of attestation responders, Direct Anonymous Attestation has been proposed as a solution, which uses a group signature scheme to prevent revealing the identity of individual signers. Proof of space (PoS) have been proposed to be used for malware detection, by determining whether the L1 cache of a processor is empty (e. g., has enough space to evaluate the PoSpace routine without cache misses) or contains a routine that resisted being evicted.

The Microsoft products Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows RT make use of a Trusted Platform Module to facilitate BitLocker Drive Encryption. Other known applications with runtime encryption and the use of secure enclaves include the Signal messenger and the e prescription service ("E Rezept") by the German government.

Trusted Computing would allow companies to create a digital rights management (DRM) system which would be very hard to circumvent, though not impossible. An example is downloading a music file. Sealed storage could be used to prevent the user from opening the file with an unauthorized player or computer. Remote attestation could be used to authorize play only by music players that enforce the record company's rules. The music would be played from curtained memory, which would prevent the user from making an unrestricted copy of the file while it is playing, and secure I/O would prevent capturing what is being sent to the sound system. Circumventing such a system would require either manipulation of the computer's hardware, capturing the analogue (and thus degraded) signal using a recording device or a microphone, or breaking the security of the system. New business models for use of software (services) over Internet may be boosted by the technology. By strengthening the DRM system, one could base a business model on renting programs for a specific time periods or "pay as you go" models. For instance, one could download a music file which could only be played a certain number of times before it becomes unusable, or the music file could be used only within a certain time period.

Trusted Computing could be used to combat cheating in online games. Some players modify their game copy in order to gain unfair advantages in the game; remote attestation, secure I/O and memory curtaining could be used to determine that all players connected to a server were running an unmodified copy of the software.

Trusted Computing could be used to guarantee participants in a grid computing system are returning the results of the computations they claim to be instead of forging them. This would allow large scale simulations to be run (say a climate simulation) without expensive redundant computations to guarantee malicious hosts are not undermining the results to achieve the conclusion they want.

One of the early motivations behind trusted computing was a desire by media and software corporations for stricter DRM technology to prevent users from freely sharing and using potentially copyrighted or private files without explicit permission. An example could be downloading a music file from a band: the band's record company could come up with rules for how the band's music can be used. For example, they might want the user to play the file only three times a day without paying additional money. Also, they could use remote attestation to only send their music to a music player that enforces their rules: sealed storage would prevent the user from opening the file with another player that did not enforce the restrictions. Memory curtaining would prevent the user from making an unrestricted copy of the file while it is playing, and secure output would prevent capturing what is sent to the sound system.

A user who wanted to switch to a competing program might find that it would be impossible for that new program to read old data, as the information would be "locked in" to the old program. It could also make it impossible for the user to read or modify their data except as specifically permitted by the software.

The law in many countries allows users certain rights over data whose copyright they do not own (including text, images, and other media), often under headings such as fair use or public interest. Depending on jurisdiction, these may cover issues such as whistleblowing, production of evidence in court, quoting or other small scale usage, backups of owned media, and making a copy of owned material for personal use on other owned devices or systems. The steps implicit in trusted computing have the practical effect of preventing users exercising these legal rights. or server inaccessibility, at times with no compensation. Alternatively in some cases the vendor refuses to provide services in future which leaves purchased material only usable on the present and increasingly obsolete hardware (so long as it lasts) but not on any hardware that may be purchased in future. Proponents of trusted computing believe that owner override defeats the trust in other computers since remote attestation can be forged by the owner. Owner override offers the security and enforcement benefits to a machine owner, but does not allow them to trust other computers, because their owners could waive rules or restrictions on their own computers. Under this scenario, once data is sent to someone else's computer, whether it be a diary, a DRM music file, or a joint project, that other person controls what security, if any, their computer will enforce on their copy of those data. This has the potential to undermine the applications of trusted computing to enforce DRM, control cheating in online games and attest to remote computations for grid computing.

Because a Trusted Computing equipped computer is able to uniquely attest to its own identity, it will be possible for vendors and others who possess the ability to use the attestation feature to zero in on the identity of the user of TC enabled software with a high degree of certainty. Such a capability is contingent on the reasonable chance that the user at some time provides user identifying information, whether voluntarily, indirectly, or simply through inference of many seemingly benign pieces of data. (e. g. search records, as shown through simple study of the AOL search records leak). One common way that information can be obtained and linked is when a user registers a computer just after purchase. Another common way is when a user provides identifying information to the website of an affiliate of the vendor. While proponents of TC point out that online purchases and credit transactions could potentially be more secure as a result of the remote attestation capability, this may cause the computer user to lose expectations of anonymity when using the Internet. Critics point out that this could have a chilling effect on political free speech, the ability of journalists to use anonymous sources, whistle blowing, political blogging and other areas where the public needs protection from retaliation through anonymity. The TPM specification offers features and suggested implementations that are meant to address the anonymity requirement. By using a third party Privacy Certification Authority (PCA), the information that identifies the computer could be held by a trusted third party. Additionally, the use of direct anonymous attestation (DAA), introduced in TPM v1.2, allows a client to perform attestation while not revealing any personally identifiable or machine information. The kind of data that must be supplied to the TTP in order to get the trusted status is at present not entirely clear, but the TCG itself admits that "attestation is an important TPM function with significant privacy implications". It is, however, clear that both static and dynamic information about the user computer may be supplied (Ekpubkey) to the TTP (v1.1b), it is not clear what data will be supplied to the “verifier” under v1.2. The static information will uniquely identify the endorser of the platform, model, details of the TPM, and that the platform (PC) complies with the TCG specifications The dynamic information is described as software running on the computer. Another problem is that the technical specifications are still changing, so it is unclear which is the standard implementation of the trusted stack.

People have voiced concerns that trusted computing could be used to keep or discourage users from running software created by companies outside of a small industry group. Microsoft has received a great deal of bad press surrounding their Palladium software architecture, evoking comments such as "Few pieces of vaporware have evoked a higher level of fear and uncertainty than Microsoft's Palladium", "Palladium is a plot to take over cyberspace", and "Palladium will keep us from running any software not personally approved by Bill Gates". The concerns about trusted computing being used to shut out competition exist within a broader framework of consumers being concerned about using bundling of products to obscure prices of products and to engage in anti competitive practices.

In the widely used public key cryptography, creation of keys can be done on the local computer and the creator has complete control over who has access to it, and consequentially their own security policies. In some proposed encryption decryption chips, a private/public key is permanently embedded into the hardware when it is manufactured, and hardware manufacturers would have the opportunity to record the key without leaving evidence of doing so. With this key it would be possible to have access to data encrypted with it, and to authenticate as it. It is trivial for a manufacturer to give a copy of this key to the government or the software manufacturers, as the platform must go through steps so that it works with authenticated software. Therefore, to trust anything that is authenticated by or encrypted by a TPM or a Trusted computer, an end user has to trust the company that made the chip, the company that designed the chip, the companies allowed to make software for the chip, and the ability and interest of those companies not to compromise the whole process. A security breach breaking that chain of trust happened to a SIM card manufacturer Gemalto, which in 2010 was infiltrated by US and British spies, resulting in compromised security of cellphone calls. It is also critical that one be able to trust that the hardware manufacturers and software developers properly implement trusted computing standards. Incorrect implementation could be hidden from users, and thus could undermine the integrity of the whole system without users being aware of the flaw.