The future of trusted computing: an outlook

One can expect a number of new applications that support the management of large networks, for example, to automatically verify that all machines have a proper patch level or only contain company authorised software, to maintain control over signature and encryption keys, etc. As trusted computing (TC) technology exists on the lowest hardware level of the computer, it has to be further supported by higher-level functionality such as the operating system before mainstream applications can fully profit from the concept. Thus, outside of such applications and those that use cryptography anyway, little use will be made of TC in the near future. The candidate application that always most commonly appears in the press and various Internet discussions is the use of TC for digital rights management (DRM), i.e. the option to attach a policy to a piece of data and remotely enforce this policy. While research in this area is becoming rather active, the author is not aware of any attempts to use Trusted Computing Group (TCG) technology to this end on a personal computer (PC) platform. It is debatable if the TC concepts can significantly assist a DRM system on a PC platform without massive changes to the underlying operating system. Without some significant innovation, a DRM system using the Trusted Platform Module will probably not be much more secure than one without.