With all the long history of dialogue about the inaccuracies of SKS's talk you sure lend a lot of credence to his quotes in that TCC article. It's almost as though when what he says suits your position you embrace it but at other times we speak of talk of his in a different light.
I know you implied when I posted this before that he must have been waxing optimistic for the ears of shareholders and potential investors and I don't agree. I do not think between when the below comments were made which I consider an accurate portrayal of reality at the time and when the TCC took place five months later that anything material changed. That is, vendors were planning on putting TPMs in then, they were at the time of the TCC and they still are. Bear in mind I do not care a great deal one way or the other because first, PCs get deployed first, and second, even if TPMs were ready today in devices other than Windows Phone 8, there won't be immediate enterprise customer demand to use them. If TPMs were broadly available today (ie. on more than Windows Phone 8) how many large organizations would Wave or any other vendor be bringing to carriers anytime soon requesting TPM provisionment (for pilots)?
So clearly, you can't go out and buy the devices yet, handheld devices with TPMs in them. There are a few from Microsoft, there will be a lot more. I think the marketplace will be a little bit surprised by just how broadly that becomes available. If we believe what we're being told by the supply chain and the infrastructure and the players that are out there, I'm a little jaded. They all think it's going to be second quarter sometime. It's not, it's going to take them this whole year. But it will begin to show up in scale. And I think that it's a -- we've seen this process, it's takes a while for everybody to pay attention. But you're going to have a generic capability to put keys in a mobile device.
"The only way we can wrestle control back from Verizon is through a requirement placed on the environment by a player strong enough to do that," he says. "The only player -- emphasis on the word 'only' -- is the U.S. federal space."
In my opinion at the time he made the TCC comments, vendors and carriers had already conceded a roadmap for TPMs but that doesn't mean it happens per any specific timeline. The advantages for all players to give the enterprise better security is clear but is the deployment ready for primetime? Put all the technical procedures in place but will customers use it? Look at PCs. We're still waiting.
You can take the "wrestle control" terminology literally OR you can look at SKS's March comments, the continuing development work in TCG/GP, the lack of customer demand for TPMs and come to the conclusion that it's not about Verizon giving up control it's about Verizon waiting for primetime.
Why would Verizon mind giving an enterprise control of a TPM root of trust when Verizon could use that same root of trust to sell services to the TPM's owner?
Why would Verizon mind giving an enterprise control of a TPM root of trust when Verizon still controls the UICC?
Why would Verizon mind giving an enterprise control of a TPM root of trust when Verizon can sell services that use the TEE?
AI
