Trusted Platform Module – A Survey

Recently, computer security has been trending toward hardware security, notably Trusted Platform Module (TPM). This paper describes some of the recent research of TPM, giving a high level idea of how it works and its inception into mainstream security. This paper also describes how some of its unique features make it a secure trusted module. The TPM architecture and functionality will also be presented. Lastly, we describe some security issues of TPM. Issues such as how to bootstrap trust in a computer with TPM and the security of authorization data in TPM. The guideline of TPM specifies its essential security and functionality, but leaves the implementations up to the programmers. Therefore, this paper does not compare various implementations of TPMs.