Improvement on TCG attestation and its implication for DRM

Abstract

TCG (Trusted Computing Group) has defined a set of standards. The main features of the standards are protection against theft of secrets held on the platform and a mechanism for the platform to prove that it is in a trusted state, called attestation. However, the attestation mechanism is vulnerable to relay attack because of the lack of linkage between the endpoint identity and attestation message. We show here how to defeat the attack by employing a new agent, called Network Interface Monitoring Agent (NIMA). In addition, we show that the NIMA-based approach can render DRM more robust and efficient, especially in case of protecting a company's sensitive data. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.