David Geer recently spoke with Steven Sprague, one of the original founders of the Trusted Computing Group, a nonprofit forum to develop open standards for hardware-enabled trusted computing and security technologies. Steven is a long-time advocate of securing PC platforms via hardware chips.

Listen to the original interview here, or visit our Podcast Center for more audio interviews.

David Geer: What is the trusted platform module or TPM hardware security chip?

Steven Sprague: The trusted platform module is a new hardware chip in your PC. It's now shipping in most enterprise PC platforms -- so business computers versus consumer computers -- and it's a hardware chip that stores securely credentials and keys that can be used for both protecting data and strong authentication to the network. So this is a chip that will ultimately help us as users because it will eliminate the need for us to have user ID and password to access all services.



Geer: How is it going to remove the need for a user IDs and passwords for a great deal of services?



Sprague: So this is actually a technology that we as consumers are very familiar with in other devices. For example, you imagine your cell phone. Every time you drive by a cell tower you don't have to log onto that cell tower. And that's done because inside the cell phone there's a chip that manages the identity of that phone to the network. What the trusted platform module provides is a similar type of container, but that can be used really by any service provider to allow the machine to authenticate to the network. So in the future, what will happen is, you as a user authenticate to your machine and then the machine keeps track of the 2,000 different places that you'd like to be a subscriber on the network, whether for free, whether access to your email, or even for paid services.



Geer: When I think of removing the need for user IDs and passwords, clearly I guess there's an advantage for the network that you're connecting to, but how does the chip make your laptop or computer that's connecting to the network more secure?



Sprague: Well, because what happens is a service provider - like let's say my administrator for my email system - can ask my computer to generate a unique secret key

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