Where did the technical ideas come from?
The TC concept of booting a machine into a known state is implicit in early PCs where the BIOS was in ROM and there was no hard drive in which a virus could hide. The idea of a trusted bootstrap mechanism for modern machines seems to have first appeared in a paper by Bill Arbaugh, Dave Farber and Jonathan Smith, “A Secure and Reliable Bootstrap Architecture”, in the proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (1997) pp 65-71. It led to a US patent: “Secure and Reliable Bootstrap Architecture”, U.S. Patent No. 6,185,678, February 6th, 2001. Bill’s thinking developed from work he did while working for the NSA on code signing in 1994, and originally applied to rebooting ATM switches across a network. The Microsoft folk have also applied for patent protection on the operating system aspects. (The patent texts are here and here.) There may be quite a lot of prior art. Markus Kuhn wrote about the TrustNo1 Processor years ago, and the basic idea behind a trustworthy operatin
