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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).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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

submitted 10 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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[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 9 points 10 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 10 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.

[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I can't see that being a reasonable approach for them to take, tbh. One option with TPM is that your system logs in automatically to the desktop, in which case they can just turn it on and use it normally. The other is that it requires a password at some point during startup, to which they could just use a (hardware) keylogger.

[–] NekkoDroid@programming.dev 4 points 10 months ago

It only at most auto logs you into the display manager or more generally into login. Then you still need to get root access to modify anything from there. Login would still be based on user password/key/whatever.

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