"There's a variety of platform opportunities for enabling stronger systems security and attestation" with the new spec, said Jim Ward, president of TCG and senior technical staff member for security strategy at IBM Corp. "I would expect to see some platforms exploit the 1.2 TPM features," before the advent of Longhorn, he added.
Separately, the TCG has formed a handheld working group to take the security architecture to PDAs. Sony Corp., which makes Palm OS-based handhelds, chairs the group.
TCG already has separate teams working on issues related to cellphones, servers and desktops. The cellphone and PDA working groups have no specific milestone targets yet, but those may emerge after the next TCG meeting in Orlando the week of Nov. 17.
In October, Sun joined the TCG which to date has been primarily focused on implementations in a Windows environment. Indeed, Microsoft helped lead the work on the 1.2 version TPM to match up with its Longhorn plans.
"The TCG represents the first standards group to take up systems integrity and a secure boot process, and we believe they have done a lot of good work so far," said Tom Tahan, directory of security technology at Sun. "We don't have any products [using TPMs] yet, but we are studying the technology and determining what we want to do with it," he added.
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