Trusted Computing Group

While the tech industry seems to go silent in August with vacations and a lull in events, the Trusted Computing Group continues to move forward to advocate trusted platforms that take advantage of a hardware root of security. This summer, we have seen much activity around self-encrypting drives. ­ Did you catch the recent announcement of the first solid-state encrypting drives, from TCG member Samsung?

Another TCG member, Dell, is using these with member Wave's software to ensure that data is protected against loss and theft, and the TPM protects keys from attack. Other TCG members continue producing self-encrypting hard drives, and this month, Dr. Marco Sanvido of TCG member Hitachi addresses the Flash Memory Summit about TCG specifications for use in future self-encrypting flash drives.

On the network security front, our very own Steve Hanna has been invited to deliver a keynote address at Interop Mumbai, Oct. 7-9. India is one of the world¹s leading IT markets, and this is an exciting venue to share information about TCG¹s Trusted Network Connect specifications and how they're being used.

Speaking of world markets, inside our organization, we are delighted to announce the appointment of Jing De Jong-Chen of Microsoft as vice president of TCG. Jing is director of government security at Microsoft and works with IT and government security experts around the globe on the latest developments in securing data, systems and networks. Jing's impressive bio can be found on TCG¹s site.

We also are thrilled that we can work daily with TCG treasurer Boris Balacheff, HPLabs Systems Security Lab, Hewlett-Packard. Boris works in the UK for HP's European research Labs and is widely experienced with TCG technology going back to his contributions to the design of the first TPM specifications. Today, besides providing critical governance for TCG money matters, he co-chairs the Certification Program Committee that recently delivered the first TCG Certification Program for TPM v1.2.

For those tracking on the TPM certification program, announced in June, members are signing up for the program and we hope to publish a list of certified products soon. The certification program will demonstrate security and correctness of specification implementations and will give buyers an easily identifiable way to ensure consistency, interoperability and security of products. Stay tuned for news on our next effort: certification of products using Trusted Network Connect specifications.

Many in the international development community were cheered by our recent announcement of ISO standardization for the TPM.