191–200 of 273 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mine, and I like it to stay that way. A TPM can be a valuable tool for protecting my data, making it difficult if not impossible for anyone to decrypt my drives. TPM+PIN is hard to beat.
TFA literally shows a TPM+PIN is totally insufficient to protect your data
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you could replace all the vendor keys (including the firmware signing keys) with your own then TPM could make sense. But today's TPMs don't support that.
> If you could replace all the vendor keys [...] You very much can. It's trivial. TPMs have four key "hierarchies" each of which has a seed . Of those four, one (the "null" hierarchy) gets a random seed each time the TPM is reset, while the other three (the platform, endorsement, and owner hierarchies) have their seeds stored in EEPROM/NVRAM, and there are functions in the spec for replacing those with new, randomly…
Only when you can bring your own keys for the entire boot and trust chain can you untether yourself from the vendor once you have purchased the hardware.
It says any TPM can be defeated in 2-3 hrs with physical access. Is the AMD one different? Can it be defeated over networks? And is this something I should be concerned about since I just bought a new AMD machine?
One of the authors here. This attack is relevant if your machine is physically exposed to attacks, e.g., in an office environment or while traveling, and if you don't use any additional pre-boot passphrase to protect the disk (but rely solely on AMD's fTPM). When TPMs became popular, dedicated TPMs were mainly used, being a separate chip on the mainboard connected via the SPI or LPC bus. These were prone to (relative…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Erm… yes, actually. For DRM to work, it has to be running in a trusted environment where the user can’t just load up a debugger as superuser and read the keys from memory. The way you do that is by using secure boot to ensure that you are running a trusted kernel that enforces appropriate access controls… which requires TPM. One of the main selling points of TPM is that you have chain of trust to ensure the boot proc…
There is some confusion because there _are_ DRM systems that require users to use Secure Boot with a TPM: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/phutif/riot_games...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TPM's true owner is the NSA, not you or I. https://www.stat.rice.edu/~dobelman/kstorm.txt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6337282 https://www.militaryaerospace.com/computers/article/16711478... https://www.businessinsider.com/leaked-german-government-war... https://supplychaindigital.com/technology/nsa-trusted-comput... https://redmondmag.com/articles/2013/08/22/windows-8-securit... https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/secur…
The first link said nothing about TPMs. The second link is nonsense. The third link says the NSA "teams" with the TCG, which could be concerning indeed, but there's no details there. The fourth link is light on details and full of FUD. The fifth link says roughly the same as the third, and is equally light on details. The sixth link is like the fourth but it does have some actually useful information that says you're…
There are many things to worry about when it comes to firmware backdoors, the TPM ain't one of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sometimes wonder if it'll be a selling point of Chinese CPUs in the future, "our CPU might not be the fastest, but it's the only one running at any given time!". People don't need "flagship" CPUs for every single purpose. There is no reason why one cannot have a slower more private system for specific purposes, say general purpose computing, and the faster one with the autonomous network-aware CPU and OS be used fo…
Issue here is that I trust the Chinese even less to not have something like this hidden in the hardware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is amazing since windows 11 is full of mentions of green energy, lowering energy consumption and asking you to lower screen brightness to lower carbon emissions. Total green washing when you consider the gigantic amounts of ewaste that arbitrary cut off date will lead to. It's just funny tbh, like I get it's most likely very different teams working on those things but it's tone deaf at best. But hey at least th…
This is what most of the consumer facing eco trends feel like. Kool-aid Jammers are my latest laugh. Plastic pouch. Plastic straw wrapper. Paper straw. Right, the straw was the enemy here?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you could replace all the vendor keys [...] You very much can. It's trivial. TPMs have four key "hierarchies" each of which has a seed . Of those four, one (the "null" hierarchy) gets a random seed each time the TPM is reset, while the other three (the platform, endorsement, and owner hierarchies) have their seeds stored in EEPROM/NVRAM, and there are functions in the spec for replacing those with new, randomly…
You cut off the "including the firmware signing keys" part, that's critical. Otherwise the vendor could be coerced or subverted to sign malicious firmware which then subverts your system at runtime. Only when you can bring your own keys for the entire boot and trust chain can you untether yourself from the vendor once you have purchased the hardware.
I.e., I'm objecting to this focus on TPM in TFA and this discussion because a voltage fault injection vulnerability in the SP is fatal to security regardless of TPM usage/non-usage. I'm also objecting to the idea that TPM adds vulnerabilities when a non-TPM-using system already is full of ways for NSA and/or other such agencies to backdoor it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the authors here. This attack is relevant if your machine is physically exposed to attacks, e.g., in an office environment or while traveling, and if you don't use any additional pre-boot passphrase to protect the disk (but rely solely on AMD's fTPM). When TPMs became popular, dedicated TPMs were mainly used, being a separate chip on the mainboard connected via the SPI or LPC bus. These were prone to (relative…
This is important because one purpose of TPMs is to prevent the owner of the machine from doing certain things (as in Digital Rights Management). And the owner of the machine presumably has physical access.