Understanding trusted computing: will its benefits outweigh its drawbacks?

The Trusted Computing Platform Architecture (TCPA) and the Microsoft's Palladium have similar (though not identical) architectures and similar goals. Both systems are part of a more general approach called trusted computing (TC). In this article the author introduces TC's basic concepts and discusses their implications. However, the individual proposals are still in flux and some kind of convergence between them seems likely, so he only discusses the general features of TC.