[Infowarrior] - Apple makes Trusted Computing cool

[Richard Forno]

Apple makes Trusted Computing cool
Published: 2006-08-02
http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/270?ref=rss

LAS VEGAS--Apple Computer is doing far more to help the adoption of the
controversial security technology known as Trusted Computing than other
proponents, Mac security researcher Bruce Potter told attendees on Wednesday
at the Black Hat Briefings.

Through the coolness of the iPod and its iTunes Music Service, the company
has already made another controversial technology--digital-rights
management--widely accepted by the the company's consumers, Potter argued,
pointing to the more than 1 billion songs sold by the company.

"More than anything happening on the enterprise side, it's the coolness and
the consumers that will get this accepted," said Potter, a member of the
Shmoo Group, a collection of security professionals.

Among other things, Apple uses the hardware component of Trusted Computing,
known as the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), to verify that the company's
PowerPC-to-Intel interpreter only works on authentic Apple hardware. While
Apple does not ship a tool for checking a Mac's TPM, Potter and the Shmoo
Group installed a Linux distribution and specialized tools to analyze the
data created by the hardware.

The Trusted Computing Platform uses encryption and specialized memory to
secure a computer's data, allowing only the application that created a file
to access that data and allowing hard drive data to be locked to a specific
computer, for example. However, critics worry that, without adequate policy
guidelines, the technology could be used by third parties to undermine
consumers' rights to their own data.

The U.S. Army recently required that all personal computer procured by
servicemen use the latest version of the TPM.

About 20 million computers, most of them laptops, shipped with the Trusted
Platform Module in 2005, according to the Trusted Computing Group. Apple is
expected to ship 10 million Macs, the majority of them Intel-based, in 2006.