On the deployment of Mobile Trusted Modules

Posted by Ken Y-N on March 8th, 2008 at 01:40pm

A short paper has recently been publish on Mobile Trusted Modules (MTMs) and their deployment. The authors are Andreas U. Schmidt, Nicolai Kuntze, and Michael Kasper from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT). This may be downloaded from Cornell University’s arXiv e-print service. The abstract is as follows:

In its recently published TCG Mobile Reference Architecture, the TCG Mobile Phone Work Group specifies a new concept to enable trust into future mobile devices. For this purpose, the TCG devises a trusted mobile platform as a set of trusted engines on behalf of different stakeholders supported by a physical trust-anchor. In this paper, we present our perception on this emerging specification. We propose an approach for the practical design and implementation of this concept and how to deploy it to a trustworthy operating platform. In particular we propose a method for the take-ownership of a device by the user and the migration (i.e., portability) of user credentials between devices.

It describes how the Mobile Phone Working Group (MPWG) reference architecture can be implemented on a slightly-modified TPM trust anchor, and with the use of virtualisation many use cases can be supported. Indeed, a vMTM (virtualised MTM) can even replace a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) for device authentication. Well worth a read to find out more about how an MTM can be used.

Tags: Fraunhofer

Under MTM Tags: Fraunhofer