I arrived at that decision over four years ago ... TCPA possibly didn't decide on it until two years ago. In the assurance session in the TCPA track at spring 2001 intel developer's conference I claimed my chip was much more KISS, more secure, and could reasonably meet the TCPA requirements at the time w/o additional modifications. One of the TCPA guys in the audience grossed that I didn't have to contend with the committees of hundreds helping me with my design. There are actually significant similarities between my chip and the TPM chips. I'm doing key gen at very first, initial power-on/test of wafer off the line (somewhere in dim past it was drilled into me that everytime something has to be handled it increases the cost). Also, because of extreme effort at KISS, the standard PP evaluation stuff gets much simpler and easier because most (possibly 90 percent) of the stuff is N/A or doesn't exist early ref: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm2.htm#staw or refs at (under subject aads chip strawman): http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#aads brand & other misc. stuff: http://www.asuretee.com/ random evauation refs: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#13 anybody seen (EAL5) semi-formal specification for FIPS186-2/x9.62 ecdsa? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#86 formal fips186-2/x9.62 definition for eal 5/6 evaluation adam@cypherspace.org on 8/15/2002 6:44 pm wrote: I think a number of the apparent conflicts go away if you carefully track endorsement key pair vs endorsement certificate (signature on endorsement key by hw manufacturer). For example where it is said that the endorsement _certificate_ could be inserted after ownership has been established (not the endorsement key), so that apparent conflict goes away. (I originally thought this particular one was a conflict also, until I noticed that.) I see anonymous found the same thing. But anyway this extract from the CC PP makes clear the intention and an ST based on this PP is what a given TPM will be evaluated based on: http://niap.nist.gov/cc-scheme/PPentries/CCEVS-020016-PP-TPM1_9_4.pdf p 20: | The TSF shall restrict the ability to initialize or modify the TSF | data: Endorsement Key Pair [...] to the TPM manufacturer or designee. (if only they could have managed to say that in the spec). Adam -- http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/