Free Rootkit with Every New Intel Machine

[Leichter, Jerry]

| ...Apple is one vendor who I gather does include a TPM chip on their
| systems, I gather, but that wasn't useful for me.
Apple included TPM chips on their first round of Intel-based Macs.
Back in 2005, there were all sorts of stories floating around the net
about how Apple would use TPM to prevent OS X running on non-Apple
hardware.

In fact:

	- Some Apple models contain a TPM module (the Infineon TPM1.2);
		some (second generation) don't;

	- No current Apple model contains an EFI (boot) driver for the
		module;

	- No current version of OS X contains a driver to access the
		module for any purpose;

	- Hence:  OS X doesn't rely on TPM to block execution on non-
		Apple hardware.  In fact, there is an active hacker's
		community that gets OS X to run on "hackintosh's" -
		an announcement of OS X on a Sony Vaio made the
		rounds just a couple of days ago.  Apparently the
		only real difficulty is writing appropriate boot
		and other low-level drivers.

Amit Singh, the author of the definitive reference on OS X internals,
has written and distributed an OS X driver for the TPM on those
machines that have it.  For all kinds of details, see his page at:

	http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/

							-- Jerry

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