what is TCPA & Fritz??

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TCPA stands for the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, an initiative led by Intel. Their stated goal is `a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform.' Palladium is software that Microsoft says it plans to incorporate in future versions of Windows; it will build on the TCPA hardware, and will add some extra features.

TCPA /Palladium provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the applications, and where these applications can communicate securely with the vendor. The obvious application is digital rights management (DRM) Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a Palladium platform, but which you won't be able to copy. The music industry will be able to sell you music downloads that you won't be able to swap. They will be able to sell you CDs that you'll only be able to play three times, or only on your birthday. All sorts of new marketing possibilities will open up.

TCPA/Palladium will also make it much harder for you to run unlicensed software. Pirate software can be detected and deleted remotely. Software companies can also make it harder for you to switch to their competitors' products; for example, Word could encrypt all your documents using keys that only Microsoft products have access to; this would mean that you could only read them using Microsoft products, not with any competing word processor.

TCPA provides for a monitoring and reporting component to be mounted in future PCs. The preferred implementation in the first phase of TCPA is a `Fritz' chip - a smartcard chip or dongle soldered to the motherboard.

When you boot up your PC, Fritz takes charge. He checks that the boot ROM is as expected, executes it, measures the state of the machine; then checks the first part of the operating system, loads and executes it, checks the state of the machine; and so on. The trust boundary, of hardware and software considered to be known and verified, is steadily expanded. A table is maintained of the hardware (audio card, video card etc) and the software (O/S, drivers, etc); Fritz checks that the hardware components are on the TCPA approved list, that the software components have been signed, and that none of them has a serial number that has been revoked. If there are significant changes to the PC's configuration, the machine must go online to be re-certified. The result is a PC booted into a known state with an approved combination of hardware and software (whose licences have not expired). Control is then handed over to enforcement software in the operating system - this will be Palladium if your operating system is Windows.

The specification was published in 2000. Atmel is already selling a Fritz chip, and although you need to sign a non-disclosure agreement to get a data sheet, you have been able to buy it installed in the IBM Thinkpad series of laptops since May 2002. Some of the existing features in Windows XP and the X-Box are TCPA features: for example, if you change your PC configuration more than a little, you have to reregister all your software with Redmond. Also, since Windows 2000, Microsoft has been working on certifying all device drivers: if you try to load an unsigned driver, XP will complain.

http://www.againsttcpa.com/tcpa-faq-en.html

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