Wave Systems Corp. (fka WAVXQ)

[x-point]

Blindsided by good news?

I think that WAVX investors are about to get blindsided by some really good news. I say blindsided because the board hasn't been paying any attention to the very developments that will result in nothing less than the actualization of Trusted Computing. Not to knock FDE and secure storage, but that was never the focus of TC; a part surely, but not the focus.

(I'll apologize ahead of time for the pedantic recap, but I'm sure not all here now have been onboard for the past decade.)

The focus was always on secure, confidential, trustworthy computation as a result of re-engineering the computing platform. We hoped that the Embassy II chip was going to be the cornerstone to the new architecture, but it wasn't to be, and so we have found our fortunes tied to the TPM instead. And there was much gnashing of teeth when sales of the Embassy Trust Suite, perhaps the first software offering designed to make use of the TPM, didn't amount to very much (to put it nicely). This has been very perplexing to most of us. Why aren't people making use of their TPMs? The short answer has to simply be that the reasons to do so just haven't been compelling enough. Support for FDE has started to change this, fortunately for shareholders, but a much better reason is soon to appear. The final major component of the Trusted Computing architecture that has been missing, what David Grawrock in his book, "The Intel Safer Computing Initiative - Building Blocks for Trusted Computing", refered to as the VMM, the Virtual Machine Manager, aka the hypervisor.

Intel announced its LaGrande architecture at IDF on September 9th, 2002. In 2006 Grawrock explained LaGrande in detail to the masses. In 2007 Intel renamed it Trusted Execution Technology, TXT, and started including it in the VPro lineup along with their Virtualization technologies, and TPM 1.2 of course. Necessary changes were made to the BIOS and the chipset over time as well, but there still hasn't been any obvious widely adopted use made of all this effort. Why? Because a bare metal hypervisor specifically designed to make use of it has been missing.

So one year ago next week Intel announced that they were collaborating with Citrix to develop just such a hypervisor.

http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=1685762

My post on this around that time didn't generate any response.

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=35557044&txt2find=citrix

A month later VMware announced a similar arrangement and said of Citrix "the companies will share code and collaborate in general on engineering, as well as marketing of the products".

http://searchvirtualdesktop.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid194_gci1349007,00.html#

Around that time it was projected that the new hypervisor(s) would be out in the second half of '09. That obviously didn't happen and I think that it was because researchers at The Invisible Things Lab discovered a couple of flaws that subverted TXT, one of which allowed TXT to be bypassed. These have been corrected, the most recent fix (severity rating: critical) having been released just a few weeks ago on December 21st.

http://security-center.intel.com/advisory.aspx?intelid=INTEL-SA-00021&languageid=en-fr


So when will we see these new hypervisors? When will seven plus years of driving the push towards Trusted Computing finally start to pay off big time for Intel? (Not to mention Wave. TPMs are going to be lighting up like the Manhatan skyline at sundown. :0 ) I can't say for sure but my bet is that it is going to be in just the next few months at most.

We always wondered what the killer ap was going to be that got people to use their TPMs. We were looking in the wrong direction. It isn't going to be an ap at all (of course neither are FDE drives) ; it is going to be a feather light bare metal hypervisor. Who knew?

Check out a prototype from Citrix. This can only be done with activated, and no doubt managed, TPMs. Anybody think that this tech isn't going to be a game changer?

http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/1437

You can also go here and hit 'play all'.

http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/612