Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Do you aware of TCPA?


Nope, first tell me what's the heck is this TCPA?
TCPA stands for Trusted Computing Platform Alliance. For the technology it will speak from TCP (The trusted computing platform). This plans that every computer will have a TPM (Trusted Platform Module), also known as Fritz-Chip, built-in. At later development stages, these functions will be directly included into CPUs, graphiccards, harddisks, soundcards, bios and so on. This will secure that the computer is in a TCPA-conform state and that he checks that it's always in this state. This means: On the first level comes the hardware, on the second comes TCPA and then comes the user. The complete communication works with a 2048 bit strong encryption, so it's also secure enough to make it impossible to decrypt this in realtime for a longer time. This secures that the TCPA can prevent any unwanted software and hardware. The long term result will be that it will be impossible to use hardware and software that's not approved by the TCPA. Presumably there will be high costs to get this certification and that these would be too much for little and mid-range companies. Therefore open-source and freeware would be condemned to die, because without such a certification the software will simply not work. In the long term only the big companies would survive and could control the market as they would like.

* So what i do for this, you can do all these to support and spread the words.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good to know I'm not the only one who's concerned. But a blog should kinda be up-to-date... AgainstTCPA site has not been updated since 2005. Even the term TCPA and TCP fell out of use years ago.

When the plans were first published, and IBM put out the first TCPA-capable laptops (June 2001) it got so much really bad publicity that they dropped the terms. Nowadays they're called TCG (Trusted Computing Group) https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/home

Current main things and their abbreviations are
Trusted Platform Module (TPM), Trusted Network Connect (TNC) and TPM Software Stack (TSS)

With all due respect - do check out AgainstTCPA and other similar pages, but also do read the specifications, implementations etc. It's not that the TCPA groups would exaggerate the threat - if anything they don't fully grasp it...

Anonymous said...

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