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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Is anyone here using their hardware TPM chips for credentials? (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago by j4k3@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[–] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 15 points 11 months ago (9 children)

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.social 9 points 11 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] metiulekm@sh.itjust.works 10 points 11 months ago (3 children)

The bootloader is stored unencrypted on your disk. Therefore it is trivial to modify, the other person just needs to power down your PC, take the hard drive out, mount it on their own PC and modify stuff. This is the Evil Maid attack the other person talked about.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 3 points 11 months ago

Otherwise you simply have a USB boot partition.

Pretty easy to set up, can be taken out to not be modified at run time unless you want plus not being stolen with the computer itself.

I see only drawbacks with a TPM for a computer system like that. In embedded credentials, mobile applications, cold credential storage, etc... it works very well, but it doesn't solve any problem that someone tech savvy doesn't have a better solution for, in my opinion.

If you are a big enough target for an evil maid attack, you are either good enough to circumvent it better than an embedded TPM, or you are rich enough to hire someone who is.

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