TPM, a pattern for an architecture for trusted computing
Antonio Muñoz, Eduardo B. Fernández · 2020
Trusted Computing (TC) is a valuable technology to use when we need to process highly sensitive data and several variants of it are now available. We present here a pattern that describes the architecture of a standard for TC, the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which is an architecture for which there are several possible implementations. Standards are effectively patterns because of the freedom to implement them in a variety of ways. The TPM architecture contains cryptographic functions to attest the use of legitimate hardware and software platforms and defines operations to perform related trusted operations. Some of its variants are intended to only store private keys in a secure way. Although promising, this technology often has not been properly used. This motivated us for defining a comprehensive methodology that facilitates the design and development of secure TC-equipped systems that can fully exploit the functionalities that this technology provides. This paper provides the first step of this methodology in the form of a security pattern. We have tried to provide a reasonable amount of information in our pattern description, aimed at the needs of application designers. This pattern is described in an abstract form independent of implementation details, but expressed with enough detail and precision for the use of designers.