Possible applications of Trusted Computing

Digital rights management

Trusted Computing would allow companies to create a Digital rights management system which would be very hard to circumvent, though not impossible. An example is downloading a music file. Remote attestation could be used so that the music file would refuse to play except on a specific music player that enforces the record company's rules. Sealed storage would prevent the user from opening the file with another player or another computer. The music would be played in curtained memory, which would prevent the user from making an unrestricted copy of the file while it is playing, and secure I/O would prevent capturing what is being sent to the sound system. Circumventing such a system would require either manipulation of the computer's hardware, capturing the analogue (and possibly degraded) signal using a recording device or a microphone, or breaking the encryption algorithm.

Identity theft protection

Trusted Computing could be used to prevent identity theft. Take for example, online banking. Remote attestation could be used when the user is connecting to the bank's server and would only serve the page if the server could produce the correct certificates. Then the user can send his encrypted account number and PIN, with some assurance that the information is private to him and the bank.

Preventing cheating in online games

Trusted computing could be used to combat cheating in online games. Some players modify their game copy in order to gain unfair advantages in the game; remote attestation, secure I/O and memory curtaining could be used to verify that all players connected to a server were running an unmodified copy of the software.

It should be noted that this only applies to games with a poor security design, in which the game client must be rendered as "trusted" in order to perform game arbitration which normally belongs to the server.

Protection from viruses and spyware

Digital signature of software will allow users to identify applications modified by third parties that could add spyware to the software. For example, a website offers a modified version of a popular instant messenger that contains spyware as a drive-by download. The operating system could notice the lack of a valid signature for these versions and inform the user that the program has been modified. Of course this leaves open the question of who determines if a signature is valid.

Trusted computing might allow increased protection from viruses. However, Microsoft has denied that this functionality will be present in its NGSCB architecture. A possible improvement in virus protection would be to allow antivirus vendors to write software that could not be corrupted by virus attacks. However, as with most advanced uses of Trusted Computing technology, preventing software corruption necessitates a Trusted Operating System, such as Trusted Gentoo In practice any operating system which aims to be backwards compatible with existing software will not be able to protect against viruses in this way.
Biometrics ATM in South Korea
Biometrics ATM in South Korea

Protection of biometric authentication data

Biometric devices used for authentication could use trusted computing technologies (memory curtaining, secure I/O) to assure the user that no spyware installed on his/her PC is able to steal sensitive biometric data. The theft of this data could be extremely harmful to the user because while a user can change a password if he or she knows that the password is no longer secure, a user cannot change the data generated by a biometric device.

Verification of remote computation for grid computing

Trusted computing could be used to guarantee participants in a grid computing system are returning the results of the computations they claim to be instead of forging them. This would allow large scale simulations to be run (say a climate simulation) without expensive redundant computations to guarantee malicious hosts are not undermining the results to achieve the conclusion they want