Over the past years, the computing industry has started various initiatives announced to increase computer security by means of new hardware architectures. The most notable effort is the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB). This technology offers useful new functionalities as the possibility to verify the integrity of a platform (attestation) or binding quantities on a specific platform (sealing).In this paper, we point out the deficiencies of the attestation and sealing functionalities proposed by the existing specification of the TCG: we show that these mechanisms can be misused to discriminate certain platforms, i.e., their operating systems and consequently the corresponding vendors. A particular problem in this context is that of managing the multitude of possible configurations. Moreover, we highlight other shortcomings related to the attestation, namely system updates and backup. Clearly, the consequences caused by these problems lead to an unsatisfactory situation both for the private and business branch, and to an unbalanced market when such platforms are in wide use.To overcome these problems generally, we propose a completely new approach: the attestation of a platform should not depend on the specific software or/and hardware (configuration) as it is today's practice but only on the "properties" that the platform offers. Thus, a property-based attestation should only verify whether these properties are sufficient to fulfill certain (security) requirements of the party who asks for attestation. We propose and discuss a variety of solutions based on the existing Trusted Computing (TC) functionality. We also demonstrate, how a property-based attestation protocol can be realized based on the existing TC hardware such as a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). * This research work has been done within the European project ECRYPT.

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The authenticated boot process introduced by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) uses binary measurements, i.e., hashes of executables, to give an indication of which software configuration runs on a given computing platform. As the binary measurements change with any software update, sealed data becomes unavailable, too. To solve this and other problems regarding binary measurements, the concept of property-based attestation has been introduced.In this paper we show how to realize both property-based attestation and property-based sealing using existing TCGenabled hard-and software. The main idea is that an enhanced boot loader translates between binary measurements and properties, allowing to attest properties of unmodified operating systems loaded. Moreover, applications running on top of this operating system can use existing mechanisms, e.g., an existing Trusted Software Stack (TSS) implementation, to seal data to properties instead of binary hash values.One cornerstone of our proposal is the ability to also revoke the translation of certain binary measurements into properties in case of identified security problems. Our proposal is ideally suited for enterprise environments having a centralized IT-management infrastructure and scales well with the number of participating clients.

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