This paper is predominantly a comment on Microsoft’s Palladium project, although it also comments on TC. (TC has several meanings--trusted computing, treacherous computing, and trustworthy computing--and the choice of meaning is left to the reader.)

The term “trusted” has its roots in the June 2002 Microsoft announcement of Palladium, a version of Windows due for release in 2004. Palladium was built upon the work of the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), including Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and HP, which published an ignored specification in 2000. Now, TCPA has evolved into the Trusted Computing Group, referred to as TCPA/TCG in the paper. Palladium has been renamed to Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB). According to Microsoft, “trusted” means that software running on a PC can be trusted by third parties, who can verify that a program running on a machine with which they are communicating has not been modified by the machine’s owner.

The paper is divided into eight sections: “Introduction,” “Trusted Computing,” “Value to Corporate and Government Users,” “Value to Content Owners,” “Value to Hardware Vendors,” “Value to Software Vendors,” “Conclusion and Scope for Future Work,” and (valuable) “References.” In order to arrive at a consistent and robust policy direction on TC, the author asserts that there is a need for tests that show whether consumers end up better or worse off with TC. Scenarios in the paper assert that values can be attributed to organizations and not individual consumers.