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Microsoft deletes official Windows 11 CPU/TPM bypass for unsupported PCs

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Re: Microsoft deletes official Windows 11 CPU/TPM bypass for unsupported PCs

#121

If you burn an ISO with Rufus it has a checkbox to skip the checks. You can also use the unattended installation system: https://github.com/memstechtips/UnattendedWinstall

Presumably that is going to stop working with new Windows 11 releases.

Re: Microsoft deletes official Windows 11 CPU/TPM bypass for unsupported PCs

#122
post #77

Windows 11 looks like the perfect reason to give UNIX-based systems another try. Literally the only thing that's kept me hooked to Windows are the Office apps. They're baked into so many of my workflows, from creating simple graphics to doing my personal finances, and of course plenty of legacy documents that I'd like to continue being able to use. They're really Windows-native I've found, even the official versions…

Same, although I have been on a Linux distro (different over the years) for the last 18 years, I keep a virtual Win7 machine just to run Outlook.

I have been able to do pretty much everything I need to workflow-wise with LibreOffice.

And any office basic dev work, I just do on the client machine or a virtual machine now.

Re: Microsoft deletes official Windows 11 CPU/TPM bypass for unsupported PCs

#123
post #35
post #18

What is Microsoft hoping to accomplish here? Given the rate of adoption of Windows 11, it seems unlikely that a majority of Windows 10 users will replace their hardware between now and October. It also seems to me that the scenario where a majority of PC users are running an unsupported Windows release is likely to create MS more problems than is offset by potential revenue from a hardware refresh cycle. Is there an…

I don't think there's anything going on here other than general corporate ham-fisted-ness. * Microsoft believes the improvements in windows 11 provide genuine benefit to their users. * Microsoft doesn't want to maintain their older OS forever. What we are seeing play out however is that the consumer / small business market either does not understand or does not care about those benefits. I don't see any viable end-st…

Wouldn't disallowing updates to Win 11 be the opposite of a logical plan if your goal was to get people upgraded to Win 11?

Re: Microsoft deletes official Windows 11 CPU/TPM bypass for unsupported PCs

#124
post #109
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a TL;DW? It's an hour long video

- Windows 11 has provided a hardware security baseline for Microsoft, with features that require hardware support (HVCI, TPM etc) to be enabled by default going forward, stating that Windows 10 strategy of off-by-default was a failure. - Admin accounts are a continued security problem within the Windows ecosystem, so a future version of Windows will be adding a new "Adminless" account model with linux-like just-in-ti…

> a new "Adminless" account model with linux-like just-in-time escalation

This was the promise of User Account Control, was it not? Or does that just prompt for confirmation for various actions, without actually enforcing a security boundary?

Re: Microsoft deletes official Windows 11 CPU/TPM bypass for unsupported PCs

#125

The requirements for Windows 11 has really put computers with older hardware in a difficult spot. They are used to Windows so they want to stay there, I want to suggest Linux Mint but I am not aware of how much of the apps used daily is supported in Linux. Not every user want to fiddle with the terminal.

[dead]

Re: Microsoft deletes official Windows 11 CPU/TPM bypass for unsupported PCs

#126
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Windows 11 has provided a hardware security baseline for Microsoft, with features that require hardware support (HVCI, TPM etc) to be enabled by default going forward, stating that Windows 10 strategy of off-by-default was a failure. - Admin accounts are a continued security problem within the Windows ecosystem, so a future version of Windows will be adding a new "Adminless" account model with linux-like just-in-ti…

> a new "Adminless" account model with linux-like just-in-time escalation This was the promise of User Account Control, was it not? Or does that just prompt for confirmation for various actions, without actually enforcing a security boundary?

UAC provides just-in-time elevation. The user belongs to the 'admin' group (aka wheel) and only receives an admin token when performing a task that requires elevation. Once the task is complete, the token is destroyed.

Re: Microsoft deletes official Windows 11 CPU/TPM bypass for unsupported PCs

#127
post #119

The title is misleading. Microsoft deleted their article documenting the bypass, not the workaround itself.

any cache?

You can just google this, there's like a million blogs out there parroting how to bypass TPM, its's not some incantation that only Microsoft had.

Re: Microsoft deletes official Windows 11 CPU/TPM bypass for unsupported PCs

#128
post #77

Windows 11 looks like the perfect reason to give UNIX-based systems another try. Literally the only thing that's kept me hooked to Windows are the Office apps. They're baked into so many of my workflows, from creating simple graphics to doing my personal finances, and of course plenty of legacy documents that I'd like to continue being able to use. They're really Windows-native I've found, even the official versions…

I'm working on a cross-platform native-first, offline-first replacement for Excel and PowerPoint, so hopefully it can help you and others make the switch.

I, too, spent far too long trapped in Windows because I couldn't get away from MS Office

Re: Microsoft deletes official Windows 11 CPU/TPM bypass for unsupported PCs

#129
post #77

Windows 11 looks like the perfect reason to give UNIX-based systems another try. Literally the only thing that's kept me hooked to Windows are the Office apps. They're baked into so many of my workflows, from creating simple graphics to doing my personal finances, and of course plenty of legacy documents that I'd like to continue being able to use. They're really Windows-native I've found, even the official versions…

I run Linux on my work machine and my office is full Windows/MacOS shop.I've so far been able to get away with using either office web apps for things like Teams, Outlook, Excel and Word and I also have a Window 11 VM that has all the desktop versions of the same apps.

I would say that 99.9% of the time I can get away with using the web app versions, even for things like Teams meetings it works really well. Once in a blue moon I will have a document that I can't open in the web versions so I fire up the VM and open it on there.

There are definitely some annoyances around this workflow but IMHO the annoyances pale in comparison to the annoyance of having to use Windows or MacOS every day.

Re: Microsoft deletes official Windows 11 CPU/TPM bypass for unsupported PCs

#130
post #78
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are none. It's so immensely frustrating to me that so many people believe that a TPM is a DRM device. I'm sure Richard Stallman's Treacherous Computing article played a big part in this. A TPM is useless for DRM, and there are way more suited solutions like Intel's PAVP that takes an encrypted video stream and puts it on the screen directly, yet I don't see nearly as much uproar about that.

It goes TPM → OS Integrity (dm-/fs-verity) → Browser Attestation (Web Integrity) → Your banking website no longer working on Linux because of "security". It’s Play Integrity for the PC. Encrypted video is a red herring. The real long game is to also get your "secure" video player to refuse playback if it detects watermark in the pirated video. This patches the analog hole. If you have attested Windows it can just ref…

Google SafetyNet is basically swiss cheese with lots of bypass solutions for custom ROMs.

A TPM may only attest that it has received an expected set of measurements (hashes). As long as discrete TPMs or PCs with unlocked CPUs exist (w/o Boot Guard), one may simply take a TPM and replay "golden" measurements to it. Bypassing this would be trivially easy.

A TPM does not have control over execution on the CPU. It only receives data from the CPU. If you have control over execution on the CPU from the reset vector, you can just replay whatever you want to a TPM and extract secrets that way. That's why TPM backed disk encryption without configuring a PIN is insecure.

Microsoft does not have the same level of control over the entire PC ecosystem as Google has over Android. That's why it's important to support open source alternatives.

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