TC Linux software
The Trusted Computing Group released open standards, and the open source community has responded by releasing a set of tools implementing the standards. I will describe here those efforts. If you know any others, please let me know.
In the event you don’t happen to have the chip needed for trusted computing (Trusted Platform Module), or you are afraid of enabling it after reading the scare tales, you can still build software and test the different applications of trusted computing using Mario Strasser’s emulator. The emulator is in the form of a kernel module, and implements most of the functionalities described on the standard. If you don’t want a TPM any more, just rmmod the module.
If you already have the chip, the drivers are already on the Kernel since version 2.6.13. To my knowledge, Atmel and Infineon chips are supported. If you have older versions of the kernel, only Atmel chips are supported, but you can still download the drivers form here. I have succesfully used the driver on a Fujitsu E8010d laptop.
To access the chip from the application layer you need a software stack, called the Trusted Software Stack. IBM has already implemented the stack and libraries to create Trusted Computing compliant software for Linux. As defined by the standard, a software daemon (tcsd) is the single point used to access the drivers. The project is called Trousers, and it works well with the emulator (latest version on the subversion repository).
There is, however, not a stable project to implement the trust chain in the Linux OS and bootloader. Trusted Grub, TCGlinux (no sources readily available) and BEAR (no longer mantained) are some of these efforts, but none seems to provide a clear documentation on how to do that. While VISTA is supposed to provide support for the trust chain, I am unsure if the Linux community will follow suit and implement this capabilities on the mainstream Kernel. At least I know there is some efoort from the Gentoo distributions, with trusted gentoo
If you want to create your own TCG testbed (TPM, Drivers and TSS,), read my follow up article on putting it all together