[heise online] Turaya: First Demo of the Open Trusted Computing Platform

The Trusted Platform Modules (TPM), that known manufacturers of computer systems have been integrating into their computer hardware for a couple of years, are supposed to provide security by protecting important data with a key that is located in the TPM hardware. But Trusted Computing, the standards of the Trusted Computing Group, and Microsofts NGSCB respectively are often also related to Digital Rights Management and the control of software- or media corporations over private computer systems.

With Turaya, a kind of virtualization technology is now made available that implements functionality like encryption by TPMs in a transparent way on guest systems like Linux. It is meant to provide the industry with an open, platform-independent basis - as opposed to, e.g., Microsoft's proprietary solution NGSCB - for the development of security-critical applications.

In the Turaya architecture, insecure guest operating systems run as applications in parallel to the protected encryption modules. With “Turaya.Crypt” and “Turaya.VPN”, the European Multilaterally Secure Computing Base (EMSCB) presents the first two modules of the open source security platform. The project is partly funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi). The aim is to develop a trustworthy computing platform based on open standards that solves security related problems of conventional platforms.

Read more (in German) at http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/74460