Editorial : Protecting private and corporate PCs

The OpenTC consortium’s first prototype was described in the January 2008 issue of the OpenTC newsletter. It essentially comprised a hypervisor with a compartment for carrying out Private Electronic Transactions (PET). The compartment sand-boxed a browser for conducting authorized transactions such as a bank transfer. By isolating that compartment from other compartments used for daily operations such as general web-surfing, and by employing remote attestation, we demonstrated that Trusted Computing (TC) can be used to provide improved protection against attacks such as phishing.