Abstract. Over the past years, many different approaches and concepts in order to increase computer security have been presented. One of the most promising of these concepts is Trusted Computing which offers various services and functionalities like reporting and verifying the integrity and the configuration of a platform (attestation). The idea of reporting a platform's state and configuration to a challenger opens new and innovative ways of establishing trust relationships between entities. However, common applications are not aware of Trusted Computing facilities and are therefore not able to utilise Trusted Computing services at the moment. Hence, this article proposes an architecture that enables arbitrary applications to perform remote platform attestation, allowing them to establish trust based on their current configuration. The architecture's components discussed in this article are also essential parts of the OpenTC proof-of-concept prototype. It demonstrates applications and techniques of the Trusted Computing Group's proposed attestation mechanism in the area of personal electronic transactions.
Near Field Communication (NFC) has become widely available on smart phones. It helps users to intuitively establish communication between local devices. Accessing devices such as public terminals raises several security concerns in terms of confidentiality and trust. To overcome this issue, NFC can be used to leverage the trusted-computing protocol of remote attestation.In this paper, we propose an NFC-enabled Trusted Platform Module (TPM) architecture that allows users to verify the security status of public terminals. For this, we introduce an autonomic and low-cost NFC-compatible interface to the TPM to create a direct trusted channel. Users can access the TPM with NFC-enabled devices. The architecture is based on elliptic-curve cryptography and provides efficient signing and verifying of the security-status report. As a proof-ofconcept, we implemented an NFC-enabled TPM platform and show that a trust decision can be realized with commodity smart phones. The NFC-enabled TPM can effectively help to overcome confidentiality issues in common public-terminal applications.
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