How does TC work?
TC provides for a monitoring and reporting component to be mounted in future PCs. The preferred implementation in the first phase of TC emphasised the role of a `Fritz’ chip – a smartcard chip or dongle soldered to the motherboard. The current version has five components – the Fritz chip, a `curtained memory’ feature in the CPU, a security kernel in the operating system (the `Nexus’ in Microsoft language), a security kernel in each TC application (the `NCA’ in Microsoft-speak) and a back-end infrastructure of online security servers maintained by hardware and software vendors to tie the whole thing together. The initial version of TC had Fritz supervising the boot process, so that the PC ended up in a predictable state, with known hardware and software. The current version has Fritz as a passive monitoring component that stores the hash of the machine state on start-up. This hash is computed using details of the hardware (audio card, video card etc) and the software (O/S, drivers, etc)
