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.
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.
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.
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.
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.