The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is an industry standards body consisting of more than 120 companies, (research) organizations and universities that creates open standards in the area of "trusted computing". In different workgroups that meet several times a year these standards are developed and refined. The most widely know development of the TCG is the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip.

TCG not only standardises the TPM but also several open network protocols for security like TNC (Trusted Network Connect) or IF-MAP (InterFace for Metadata Access Point).

Most standards are developed to secure devices and central network infrastructure. The TNC protocol enables central components to ask clients for their health status (virusscan, patchlevel) and make decisions according to the result. A hostile or unpatched system can be denied access to the network. When integrating the TPM in this scenario the problem of the "lying endpoint" can be solved (that is when an endpoint is compromised and lying about it´s actual health level - no virus found for example). In addition to that the IF-MAP protocol enables central components to share important information and inform each other of security violations.

Links:
http://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/
http://www.trustedcomputing.eu/cms/