A Practical Guide to TPM 2.0

Abstract

Our passion in writing this book is to empower and excite a rising generation of IT managers, security architects, systems programmers, application developers, and average users to use the TPM as the bedrock of increasingly sophisticated security solutions that will stem the rising tide of threats that are being aimed at us, our employers, and our civil institutions. Furthermore, the TPM is just plain cool. How many engineers, as children, played with simple cryptography for fun? The ability to send an encrypted message to a friend appeals to the secretive part of our human nature-the same part that enjoyed playing spy games when we were young. And besides being fun, there's something inherently, morally right about protecting people's assets from being stolen.The TPM 2.0 technology can accomplish this. We believe in this technology and hope to make believers of you, our readers, as well. Our hope is that you'll get as excited about this technology as we are and "go out and do wonderful things" with it, to paraphrase Robert Noyce, one of Intel's founders. Why a Book?Technical specifications are typically poor user manuals, and TPM 2.0 is no exception. One reader of the specification claimed it was "security through incomprehensibility." Although the specification attempts to describe the functionality as clearly as possible, its prime objective is to describe how a TPM should work, not how it should be used. It's written for implementers of TPMs, not for application writers using TPMs.Also, for better or for worse, the detailed operations of the TPM commands are specified in C source code. The structures are defined with various keywords and decorations that permit the Word document to be parsed into a C header file. Microsoft agreed with TCG that the source code in the specification would have an open source license and could be used to implement a TPM. However, although C can describe actions very precisely, even the best code isn't as readable as text. One of the major purposes of this book is to interpret the specification into language that is more understandable to average software developers, especially those who need to understand the low-level details of the specification.Many readers don't need to understand the detailed operation of the TPM and just want to know how to use the various functions. These readers expect TSS (the TCG software stack) middleware to handle the low-level details. They're interested in how to use the new TPM features to accomplish innovative security functions. Thus, this book is just as concerned with describing how the TPM can be used as it is with explaining how it works. Throughout the book, as features are described, use cases for those features are interwoven. The use cases aren't complete-they describe what the TPM 2.0 specification writers were thinking about when those features were designed, but the specification is so rich that it should be possible to implement many things beyond these use cases.

A Survey of Trusted Computing Solutions Using FPGAs

“…As earlier works have shown [51], FPGAs can be used to implement all six elements required for a TPM [43]. These are as follows: Securely report boot environment, secure storage of data, Secure identification of the user and the system, support for standard security system, support for multiple users, and inexpensive production.…”

Secure Boot for Reconfigurable Architectures

“…In the secure boot process, computed PCR values are compared with reference values at different times points for verification. Hash functions are one-way functions used for integrity checking [25]. PCR registers commute the cumulative hash, with any bit flip in the configuration will result in an incorrect response.…”

Secure Boot for Reconfigurable Architectures

“…In the secure boot process, computed PCR values are compared with reference values at different times points for verification. Hash functions are one-way functions that are used for the integrity checking [24]. PCR registers commute the cumulative hash, with any bit flip in the configuration will result in a n incorrect response.…”