During my recent trip to the RSA 2007 exhibition I became aware of a, I believe, very significant element of Trusted Computing. And it has to do with the pre-boot process in the secure platform.

There is a company by the name of Wave Systems Corp. ( http://www.wave.com ) which appears to be instrumental in Trusted Computing. I just learned that they apparently were a founding member of the TCG.

Wave recently presented to institutional investors during RSA at San Francisco. In a presentation ( http://www.wsw.com/webcast/agc5/wavx/ ) the CEO pointed to Wave's involvement in the preboot process (...starting at 13:50 into the presentation). In conjunction with the upcoming Seagate and Hitachi FDE hard drives this is, in my opinion, of the utmost importance. It really implies that, at this time, only Dell and Gateway can offer truly TCG secure platforms (Wave filed an 8K with the SEC) with hardware full disk encryption ( http://www.wave.com/news/press_archive/06/061208_8K.html ) .

I did some further search and found that Wave actually has been issued a patent ( http://tinyurl.com/2c6h6t ) which totally covers the mutual authentication of a main security processor (TPM) with secure peripherals (i.e. FDE hard drives) in the preboot environment. It further appears that Wave has built all the necessary, TPM interoperable, management tools (client and server).