Basically next year you could get a motherboard with a security module onboard. Which is both your friend, and not. The last EETimes-print-edition had an article with *much* more info but I found the following online. You can comment on the www.trustedpc.org stuff until October, on their site; they have whitepapers. Coprocessors Move Security Onto PC Motherboards (09/05/00, 6:51 p.m. ET) By Junko Yoshida , EE Times SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Responding to industry demand for better built-in security, vendors of PC chips and smart-card ICs are racing to develop security coprocessors that mount on a PC motherboard. Architectural approaches vary, but suppliers agree that this new design socket will start showing up in motherboards as early as the middle of next year. Integrating a security chip makes it possible "to view the PC as an endpoint for the delivery of goods and services" in the digital economy, said Geoffrey Strongin, platform security architect at Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (stock: AMD), Sunnyvale, Calif. AMD is one of the PC chip makers readying a security device. The trend is to move "core security and e-commerce functions out to the edge of the Internet, and place them in all endpoint devices including the user's PC," concurred Steven Sprague, president and chief executive officer at Wave Systems Corp. (stock: WAVX), Lee, Mass., which fields the Embassy security chip and is working with AMD on a reference design. Promoters say that while much effort has gone into securing the network and the server-side infrastructure, until very recently the client has been overlooked. Thanks to advances in SSL software technology, the transmission of data across the Internet is more secure than ever. But "vulnerability often exists at the PC and at the server," said Cees Jan Koomen, chairman of the board at security-chip vendor Pijnenburg Securealink, Vught, Netherlands, which is also developing a coprocessor. "You need a cryptographic solution in hardware, placed at the server and PC terminal," he said. That way, "critical information, such as a key, is not available except inside the chip, while the hardware can accelerate the transaction speed." Driving the security-coprocessor groundswell is an emerging specification being put together by the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, an industry group founded by Compaq Computer Corp. (stock: CPQ), Houston; Hewlett-Packard Co. (stock: HWP), Palo Alto, Calif.; IBM Corp. (stock: IBM); Intel Corp. (stock: INTC), Santa Clara, Calif.; and Microsoft Corp. (stock: MSFT), Redmond, Wash. http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20000905S0019