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Re: [Fed-Talk] FW: Army to require built-in security

On Jul 27, 2006, at 6:03 PM, Joel Esler wrote:
But what makes us think that a chip is going to protect the machine?

Among other things, the TPM is a tamper resistant and tamper evident key repository and RSA cipher engine. This allows a key to be associated with a machine in such a manner that the main CPU has no access to the key material, but can have the TPM perform encryption and decryption on its behalf (for example, for challenge/response authentication mechanisms).

This turns out to be very useful; one way to think of it is as a smart card that's soldered into the machine. The biggest uses are to:

- Allow software to challenge the machine for authorization (as Mac OS X for Intel does--in effect, the machine itself becomes an authorization dongle).

- Allow software to answer authentication and authorization challenges for network services without placing private key material somewhere vulnerable to spyware, viruses, etc.


Amanda Walker
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References: 
 >[Fed-Talk] FW: Army to require built-in security (From: George Polich <email@hidden>)
 >Re: [Fed-Talk] FW: Army to require built-in security (From: Joel Esler <email@hidden>)



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