TPM software

Some minor success playing with my TPM this afternoon.

First, I could only get the IBM DAA code to pass the first of its 4 tests - the self-test one. It couldn't connect to the TPM. I didn't look into it too far.

I thought that maybe having an uninitialized TPM might be the problem. Whenever I log in to Vista, I get a bubble from the Infineon Security Platform Solution reporting the TPM status as "uninitialized". But then I found a Microsoft article explaining how to initialize the TPM and turn it on/off and clear it. It involves Running tpm.msc (from the Start ... Run menu as an admin user), and following the prompts. It includes a reboot, where the bios presents a big warning explaining what's about to happen - quite nice. After the reboot, it's initialised, and you can set a password. Or did I type in the password before? Can't remember.

I thought that might fix the DAA code, but no. Same behaviour as before.

The next thing to try was TPM/J. It worked nicely. I can't say I tried everything, but it at least gave different responses according to whether I put the right password in or not. It gives me great optimism for future exploration/exploitation. I wonder if it's worth building a little GUI for it. That could be a good project for an undergraduate. Maybe I'll pass it on...

Oh, a couple of minor things: I was going to play with the Protégé ontology editor as well, but ran out of time. I also came across TimeML, a way of extracting rigorous temporal specifications from natural language (or something like that).