Have you ever strayed onto a strange website, clicked on an interesting icon and felt the blood drain out of your face as your computer screen flickered and went black? It happens all the time. The security of your computer is constantly at risk and clearly something must be done to neutralise the threat. Traditionally, safety precautions such as antivirus software have worked well but with more sophisticated attacks exploiting all kind of bugs, the current security programmes are simply waiting to be chewed up. After all, one piece of software cannot make an insecure system risk free.

One solution could be to change the way the hardware itself is designed. This is the approach the trusted computing initiative was leaning toward. A family of specifications were produced by the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) - a group initially headed by industry giants such as HP, IBM, Microsoft, Compaq and Intel which eventually grew to include over 190 members. They began with the stated goal of making computers more secure. One of the major products of this working group was a specification for providing a trusted subsystem using the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and additional chip to be included with computers to provide core security services and trusted computing features to the rest of the platform.

Read the complete story on Trusted Computing in this month's issue of Spider Magazine.