Early this decade, Microsoft weathered unrelenting criticism over a controversial set of technologies known as Palladium, which the company envisioned as creating a kind of secure vault to store passwords or medical records.
Academics warned it could "support remote censorship" and blacklists, likening Palladium to the Soviet Union's efforts to register typewriters and fax machines. Privacy activists predicted it would hand Microsoft "an unprecedented level of control" over the world, and free software doyen Richard Stallman solemnly dubbed it "treacherous computing."
Microsoft retreated by doing what any large bureaucracy tends to do in response to such a kerfuffle: it gave its problem a new name. Palladium became the awkwardly-titled Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, or NGSCB — and the group Microsoft coalesced around the initiative changed its name from Trusted Computing Platform Alliance to Trusted Computing Group — and critics mostly moved on to worry about the recording industry and other threats to digital liberties instead.
Since then, the NGSCB — once derided as "nagscab" — has existed in an odd kind of technological purgatory. One report in 2004 said that Microsoft has "killed" NGSCB, which the company quickly denied later the same day. In 2005 Microsoft said NGSCB was "still coming."
After six years, the supposed world-striding colossus of a technology that once sparked so much fuss (one reviewer said it might become "either Santa or Satan") is much diminished. NGSCB never did live up to its early promise — or what critics would have said was its early threat as a digital rights management tool that would restrict how people consume content on their PCs and lock them into one vendor.
"It has changed from something that was very revolutionary and grandiose into something much more modest," said Andrew Jaquith, a senior analyst at Yankee Group.
And then came BitLocker
NGSCB does live on, manifesting itself in a Microsoft technology called BitLocker, a Microsoft spokesman confirmed.
BitLocker, Microsoft's only product to come from the Trusted Computing effort, is a feature in Windows Vista Enterprise, Vista Ultimate, and Windows Server 2008 that encrypts the disk drive to protect against data theft or exposure if the computer is lost or stolen. — Trusted Computing should not be confused with Trustworthy Computing, which is Microsoft's effort to improve the security of its own products and is largely considered to be successful.
While it is useful, BitLocker hasn't taken the computing world by storm yet, or even been enough to justify upgrades to Vista, said Rob Helm of Directions on Microsoft. "BitLocker hasn't been the rage anybody expected, although there is a strong case for using that feature on laptops," he said. In addition, plenty of third-party products — many offering whole disk encryption — exist.
Bruce Schneier, crypto researcher, author, and chief security technology officer of BT, was one of the more vocal critics when Microsoft first unveiled its Trusted Computing plans in 2002. In 2005, he was still beating the drum, writing that Microsoft was attempting to stall, and possibly get Vista exempted from a best practices document for the Trusted Computing Group that addressed many of the critics' concerns.
The Best Practices Principles (PDF), which was written in 2003 and eventually published in 2005, gives consumers some control over disabling the functionality, allows devices to support multiple users, adds privacy protections, and calls for interoperability and portability of data.
