Apple’s iPhone control versus the TPM
Posted by Ken Y-N on January 18th, 2010 at 03:15pm
Here’s a bit of a technically inaccurate but sufficiently curious post from The Register on Apple’s control over the software on the iPhone. The main thrust of the article is about the impending (or otherwise…) release of the iSlate or whatever the rumoured Apple tablet will be called, but they have this comment:
Microsoft once suggested that Windows applications should be digitally signed, by Redmond, and that this would remove Trojans, viruses and all manner of nastiness, but the company was swiftly shouted down by customers who feared ceding control to the beast.
Since 2003 the Trusted Computing Platform has tried to do the same thing – creating hardware capable of implementing software policies to control the applications and use to which the hardware is put. In Trusted Computing the user is still free to replace the OS, but if they choose to run one that takes advantage of the Trusted Computing architecture then the hardware will limit the capabilities of unauthorised applications.
Well, that summarises the popular but inaccurate perception of what the Trusted Platform Module (who knows what that Trusted Computing Platform is supposed to be), but The Register does highlight that on the iPhone Apple do limit what can run through their App Store policies but I hear relatively few complaints about the locked-down nature of the platform.
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