Businesses and Governments are seeking new ways to improve their products and services, make them cost effective and take advantage of global sourcing options.

This has been largely enabled by fast, stable communication networks sharing vast volumes of data to facilitate delivery of services to customers. Sharing has led to concerns over data protection and the risks the data faces in the new open business models called Digital Business Networks.

Sharing data with partners to meet business objectives requires trust from both parties. Trust is difficult to build which is why organisations use a number of different methods to establish trust such as contracts, audits, etc. These have inherent issues which cannot easily be addressed.

The current security landscape of controls, countermeasures and mitigation strategies have not changed significantly therefore new ways are being sought to deliver improved security. This need is increasing as organisations move towards new open de-perimeterised seamless business process models.

Trusted Computing using a Trusted Platform Module claims to offer higher security for platforms leading to better data assurance and lower risk levels as well as protecting platforms from malicious code.

This paper seeks to establish if Trusted Computing can offer lower risks and greater data assurance against platforms attacks when compared with current controls.

A detailed risk assessment was performed of risks to data on current platforms, and then a further comparator assessment was performed assuming Trusted Computing Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) controls were deployed.

This comparison suggests that Trusted Computing does indeed reduce the platform risks to data by up to 67%. However, due to the low adoption of the Trusted Computing TPM technology today, there are currently few applications using this new technology. This is expected to change as leading manufacturers of processor chips develop integrated functions within their processors, which will facilitate more applications to use the TPM in the medium to long term.

There are other challenges which need to be overcome before TPM usage becomes common place. This includes a Public Key Infrastructure with certificate authorities aiding the use of the TPM. Deployment of TPM will need to extend from mainly laptops today to servers before organisations can use them for their critical data.

The microprocessor manufacturers will also need to improve on isolation technologies to support commonly used virtualisation solutions. Operating system and application vendors will also need a standard method for software hash checks support proving the integrity of software.

Trusted Computing with TPM offers a great step forward in protecting data from platform attacks as the current protection mechanisms have not changed significantly over recent years and in the author’s opinion are largely not effective against today’s attack methods. The technology needs to mature on many fronts before applications are developed and organisations gain the confidence to use it. However in the author’s opinion it is simply a matter of time before the required enablers are in place to allow wide spread adoption.