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AMI Introduces 'Trusted Computing' BIOS

Posted by michael on from the here-it-comes dept.

An anonymous reader writes "American Megatrends announced its 'trusted computing' Palladium BIOS on Jan 6. It seems that the encrypted BIOS' integrity will be verified by a special chip or flash ROM, and will in turn verify the 'authenticity, integrity and privacy' of the boot loader and the operating system. Does that mean such machines may refuse to boot any other non-'trusted' OS? After all, the list of supporting corporations include AMD, Intel, IBM, and HP, of whom we heard quite favourable statements about Linux (just for example -- *BSDs will be equally affected) so far."

1 of 617 comments (clear)

  1. awesome technology by J+x · · Score: -1, Redundant

    Microsoft is a key member of the group, so is it really possible to feel confident the software environment on your PC is operating as expected? Last time we downloaded the critical updates to WinXP, our PC started crashing again, and we had to roll it back to the pre-critical update stable version. Is that what we're to expect, or what confidence means?

    The TCPA subsystem, said AMI, uses a specialised chip or flash memory that contains the "TPM" and software which gets the TPM to cryptonise (encrypt) the BIOS and operating system.

    AMI said that when a PC boots, AMI BIOS starts "a fairly long and complex process", with the BIOS boot block addressing the TPM chip that verifies the authenticity of the BIOS.

    The BIOS then verifies the authenticity and integrity of the OS loader and the OS kernel and then passes the integrity tokens that say the PC is a "trusted entity" to the operating system.