Why isolated and trusted execution space is a good thing

Posted by Ken Y-N on August 6th, 2008 at 01:28pm

For a change, some good news about trusted computing, this time from IT Pro and written by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe.

The article starts by painting a picture of having a second operating system on a PC that has a smaller feature set and will only run trusted applications, like Microsoft’s Palladium, or Next Generation Secure Computing Base. However, the mere mention of Microsft and trust sets off many alarm bells, even though trusting Microsoft to produce an operating system is far removed from a Microsoft trusted operating system.

These days, one successful application of this is Express Gate from Asus. This provides a fast-booting mini operating system for media playback and internet access, but keeps the real operating system and data separate. Apparently it uses a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) built into the Montevina chipset from Intel to achieve this.

The full article is well worth reading here as there’s a lot of information that was new to me.

Tags: express gate, intel, montevina, ngscb, palladium