Welcome to TECOM  

The Trusted Embedded Computing (TECOM) project, an EU-funded consortium of ten partners, aims at developing trusted computing solutions for embedded platforms, which means, that TECOM ensures especially the security and safety of embedded computing systems and infrastructures. 

Motivation 

Trusted Computing (TC) is an established technology for the verification and implementation of integrity and security in personal computers (PCs). PCs have large resources of available code space, specific bus interfaces and computing power. Embedded computing platforms, for which such resources are not available, nevertheless have similar trust and security problems as the PCs. The cause of this lies in the increasing complexity and therefore instability of platforms’ operating systems and applications; furthermore, their connection to the Internet is exposing them to additional security threats and attacks.

As there are many more embedded computing platforms than PCs in the production and in the field, it has become necessary to adapt the current TC security standard also to embedded platforms.

Main issues

The project will adopt a systematic approach to the development of trusted embedded systems, consisting of hardware platforms with integrated trust components. Special attention will be dedicated to the following issues:

1.    Trusted hardware, Trusted Platform Module as VHDL design for embedded platforms, which could be adapted to different host processor systems supporting the trust architecture.

3.    Defining software interfaces for implementing easily accessible SW security modules and mechanisms into such trusted systems and working on example implementations.

4.    Trusted protocols: Elementary TC protocols like TSS (Host interface API) and TNC (trusted network connect, an advanced secure communication protocol) will be adapted to embedded platforms.

5.    Typical, specific application examples will give us feedback for the development methodology and interface requirements for the trust functionality and application friendliness.

The results and experience gained from the project will be used to influence the TC standardisation work. The project findings are expected to give impulses for the new trust based application scenarios and solutions concerning mobile phones, communications, e-commerce, automotive industry and similar.

About TECOM

TECOM is a large-scale Integrating Project, which is co-financed by the European Commission under EU Framework Programme 7 . The project is running for 3 years from January 2008 until December 2010, with an extension until March 2011. The well balanced consortium of the project consists of ten European partners from industry and academia.