You just need to be able to translate their doublespeak.
This is all publicly documented by Microsoft you just need to translate their doublespeak.
Use ChaGPT to outsource your critical thinking for you because I’m not gonna do it.
Despite the TPM being a pretty good and useful idea as a secure enclave for storing secrets, I'm concerned that giving companies the ability to perform attestation of your system's "integrity" will make the PC platform less open. We may be headed towards the same hellscape that we are currently experiencing with mobile devices.
Average folks aren't typically trying to run Linux or anything, so most people wouldn't even notice if secure boot became mandatory over night and you could only run Microsoft-signed kernels w/ remote attestation. Nobody noticed/intervened when the same thing happened to Android, and now you can't root your device or run custom firmware without crippling it and preventing the use of software that people expect to be able to use (i.e. banking apps, streaming services, gov apps, etc.).
Regardless, this is more of a social issue than a technical issue. Regulatory changes (lol) or mass revolt (also somewhat lol) would be effective in putting an end to this. The most realistic way would be average people boycotting companies that do this, but I highly doubt anyone normal will do that, so this may just be the hell we are doomed for unless smaller manufacturers step up to the plate to continue making open devices.
While I'm not a cryptographer... I never really understood the appeal of these things outside of one very well-defined threat model: namely, they're excellent if you're specifically trying to prevent someone from physically taking your hard drive, and only your hard drive, and walking out of a data centre, office, or home with it.
It also provides measured boot, and I won't downplay it, it's useful in many situations to have boot-time integrity attestation.
The technology's interesting, but as best as I can tell, it's limited through the problem of establishing a useful root-of-trust/root-of-crypt. In general:
- If you have resident code on a machine with a TPM, you can access TPM secrets with very few protections. This is typically the case for FDE keys assuming you've set your machine up for unattended boot-time disk decryption.
- You can protect the sealed data exported from a TPM, typically using a password (plus the PCR banks of a specific TPM), though the way that password is transmitted to the TPM is susceptible to bus sniffing for TPM variants which live outside the CPU. There's also the issue of securing that password, now, though. If you're in enterprise, maybe you have an HSM available to help you with that, in which case the root-of-crypt scheme you have is much more reasonable.
- The TPM does provide some niceties like a hardware RNG. I can't speak to the quality of the randomness, but as I understand it, it must pass NIST's benchmarks to be compliant with the ISO TPM spec.
What I really don't get is why this is useful for the average consumer. It doesn't meaningfully provide FDE in particular in a world where the TPM and storage may be soldered onto the same board (and thus impractical to steal as a standalone unit rather than with the TPM alongside it).
I certainly don't understand what meaningful protections it can provide to game anti-cheats (which I bring up since apparently Battlefield 6 requires a TPM regardless of the underlying Windows version). That's just silly.
Ultimately, I might be misunderstanding something about the TPM at a fundamental level. I'm not a layperson when it comes to computer security, but I'm certainly not a specialist when it comes to designing or working with TPMs, so maybe there's some glaring a-ha thing I've missed, but my takeaway is that it's a fine piece of hardware that does its job well, but its job seems too niche to be useful in many cases; its API isn't very clear (suffering, if anything, from over-documentation and over-specification), and it's less a silver bullet and more a footgun.
So basically the same thing you'd get by having an internal USB port on the system board where you could plug a thumb drive to keep the FDE key on it?
> It also provides measured boot, and I won't downplay it, it's useful in many situations to have boot-time integrity attestation.
That's the nefarious part. You get adversarial corporations trying to insist that you run their malware in order to use their service, and it's giving them a means to attempt to verify it.
Which doesn't actually work against sophisticated attackers, so the security value against real attacks is none, but it works against normies which in turn subjects the normies to the malware instead of letting someone give them an alternative to it that doesn't screw them.