Trusted Computing Group

Over the years, we have often mentioned the breadth of open source support for Trusted Computing Group technologies and specifications. One example is work conducted by Trust@FHH, a research group at the Fachhochschule Hannover, University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lower Saxony, Germany. In their words, "We are doing research in the area of IT security. Our main research interests include Trusted Computing (TC) and Trusted Network Connect (TNC) as proposed by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG). One main aspect of our work is the integration of Trusted Computing functions that are based upon the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) with TNC compatible Network Access Control solutions." 

You can read about this organization at http://trust.inform.fh-hannover.de/.

TCG member companies are quite excited about FHH's work. TCG TNC work group co-chair Steve Hanna recently commented, "FHH is doing excellent research on TNC, TPM, and related topics. In the process, they're creating a rich set of open source TNC projects."

Hanna goes on to say, "Some of these include the tNAC project, which links the TPM and TNC. Notice some really cool new things like the open source SSL-VPN using IF-T for TLS and the hardware integrity measurements using TPM. They're putting all our specs into practice."

Another project FHH has been working on is support for the TNC IF-MAP (Metadata Access Protocol). Its irond, an open source IF-MAP server, is now available! irond is completely written in JAVA. The server is based upon the IF-MAP 2.0 specification that has been recently published by the TCG. irond supports both basic authentication and certificate-based authentication for MAP clients. Development was done within the IRON project at FHH. It can be downloaded here.

FHH also participates in the ESUKOM project for real-time business security and offers support for TCG's TNC specifications. Its implementation is certified by TCG. Interested in the ESUKOM project? More information is available here.