I’m curious about the possible uses of the hardware Trusted Protection Module for automatic login or transfer encryption. I’m not really looking to solve anything or pry. I’m just curious about the use cases as I’m exploring network attached storage and to a lesser extent self hosting. I see a lot of places where public private keys are generated and wonder why I don’t see people mention generating the public key from TPM where the private key is never accessible at all.

  • wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    11 months ago

    In theory, the TPM can be used to verify that the bootloader, kernel and injtamfs haven’t been tampered with, which is very very useful as FDE (in the running machine) is only good if that remains true.

    • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
      0·
      11 months ago

      I’ve heard that before, but there are two main problems that stick out to me:

      • A lot of the marketing for TPM (at least when I was setting up bitlocker on Windows) suggests that it’s used to support decrypting drives without a password on boot. But that doesn’t seem to offer any protection from the devices being stolen. The bootloader may be safe but it’s not actually verifying that I’m the one booting the device.
      • I can’t think of a situation where someone would be able to actually modify the bootloader without also having full access to the files and secrets. Especially in a single-boot environment where every time the system is running, the device is decrypted.

      I’m not saying that it’s all just a scam or anything like that, but it really feels like I’m missing something important and obvious.