[luau] Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), an initiative led by Intel

[Elizabeth Long]

Its obvious application is to embed digital rights management
(DRM) technology in the PC. The less obvious implications include
making it easier for application software vendors to lock in
their users. 

TCPA provides for a monitoring component to be mounted in future
PCs. The likely 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); if there are significant changes, the machine
must be re-certified. The result is a PC booted into a known
state with an approved combination of hardware and software.
Control is then handed over to enforcement software in the operating
system - this is presumably Palladium if your operating system
in Windows. 

Read more here:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html