Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Over the last year or so, computer science research on code attestation has increased considerably. I have blogged about current research to overcome the policy problems created by TCG's remote attestation before (e.g., here and here). Recently, researchers from Carnegie Mellon & IBM Watson have published an interesting paper about a fine-grained attestation service called "BIND" (not to be confused with the DNS-related bind program maintained by Paul Vixie). While other approaches attempt to solve the policy problems by attesting a program's behavior or properties (rather than its identity) to a third party, this paper proposes a fine-grained attestation mechanism in which only those parts of a program are attested to a remote challenger that are really crucial for the remote challenger.

Elaine Shi, Adrian Perrig & Leendert Van Doorn, BIND: A Fine-grained Attestation Service for Secure Distributed Systems, in: Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 154-168. For more information, see here.

Seth Schoen, Compatibility, competition, and control in trusted computing environments, Information Security Technical Report (2005) 10, 105-119

Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi & Christian Stüble, Towards multilaterally secure computing platforms - with open source and trusted computing, Information Security Technical Report (2005) 10, 83-95

David Safford & Mimi Zohar, Trusted computing and open source, Information Security Technical Report (2005) 10, 74-82.

Sean Smith, Trusted Computing Platforms - Design and Applications, Springer 2005.

In the near future, I'll add a category to this page listing all weblogs that deal with trusted computing. In the mean time, here is a list of the weblogs I am aware of:

• Jesus Molina
• Seth Schoen from the EFF (occasionally)
• Unlimited Freedom (hasn't posted for about a year)

If you are aware of any other TC-related blogs, please send me an email.

Increasingly, people are working on virtual, software-based implementations of the TPM (just to give one example). In addition, companies are thinking about implementing virtual TPMs due to cost considerations. Much has been written about potential policy problems of hardware-based TPMs. It's interesting whether the policy implications of virtual TPMs are any different. Any thoughts?

As recent news (Wired and CNet) indicates, Apple is using an Infineon TPM chip in order to bind its forthcoming x86-based version of Mac OS to particular hardware platforms (although the story is disputed, see here). The OSx86Project develops a version of Mac OS that can be run on any arbitrary x86 platform. This is just another example of how companies attempt to tie products and/or services together by technology. Apple is doing a similar thing with its iTunes service and the iPod player. There are many other examples.

Recently, Digital Cinema Initiatives (a joint venture of Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros. Studios) finally published their Digital Cinema System Specification. In chapter 9, the document includes an 80-page-long specification of the security requirements for digitalized cinemas. There is a lot of the usual DRM parlance in there (including "trusted device lists", device revocation, key management etc.). The chapter also includes an elaborate specification for the use