Trusted Computing Management Server Making Trusted Computing User Friendly

Abstract

Personal Computers (PC) with build in Trusted Computing (TC) technology are already well known and widely distributed. Nearly every new business notebook contains now a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and could be used with increased trust and security features in daily application and use scenarios. However in real life the number of notebooks and PCs where the TPM is really activated and used is still very small.

Main reasons for this low acceptance is mostly the complexity of the system and also handling problems by the ITC departments as well as the required amount of resources and work which is associated with daily management and operation, Additionally most users don’t have the technical understanding of operating TPM features by themselves, they just expect that the enterprise PC (with built in TPM) works and all features are available as they know it from other software standard installations.

A similar situation was known about 15 years ago when PCs where very new and the little trained users also in large organisations where left alone with this new technology. The situation changed when networking and centralized ITC management came up and critical, inconvenient and demanding operations like data storage, backup procedures as well as installing new software was done using network centric management tools. Since that time the user can handle a PC as a simple tool and they are not required to learn in depth ITC technology. The typical enterprise PC user knows that the support for critical issues is just at the other end of the network.

We think that the current low use rates of trusted computing functions are based on similar experiences and expectations. Therefore the industry has now developed new TPM and TC management server capabilities, where the trusted platform functions of a PC can easily be handled by the centralized ITC department together with the already established network management functionality of the networks domain server.