Method and system for providing a trusted platform module in a hypervisor environment

A method is presented for implementing a trusted computing environment within a data processing system. A hypervisor is initialized within the data processing system, and the hypervisor supervises a plurality of logical, partitionable, runtime environments within the data processing system. The hype...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors Bade, Steven A, Catherman, Ryan Charles, Hoff, James Patrick, Kelley, Nia Letise, Ratliff, Emily Jane
Format Patent
LanguageEnglish
Published 27.01.2009
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Summary:A method is presented for implementing a trusted computing environment within a data processing system. A hypervisor is initialized within the data processing system, and the hypervisor supervises a plurality of logical, partitionable, runtime environments within the data processing system. The hypervisor reserves a logical partition for a hypervisor-based trusted platform module (TPM) and presents the hypervisor-based trusted platform module to other logical partitions as a virtual device via a device interface. Each time that the hypervisor creates a logical partition within the data processing system, the hypervisor also instantiates a logical TPM within the reserved partition such that the logical TPM is anchored to the hypervisor-based TPM. The hypervisor manages multiple logical TPM's within the reserved partition such that each logical TPM is uniquely associated with a logical partition.