The Need for TCPA

The Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) has produced open specifications for a security chip and related software interfaces. The TCPA chip is designed to provide client machines with a minimal but essential hardware base for client side security. Recent papers have attacked the TCPA specification out of ignorance of its goals and capabilities. This paper summarizes what the TCPA chip does, gives examples of important applications of the chip, and shows why these applications are critical to client side security. This paper is organized into three parts: