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0 pointslogical_person1y ago0 comments

> encrypted sessions (and/or EK cert verification) without PIN are not much more then obfuscation

this is completely incorrect, encrypted sessions defeat TPM interposers when there is a factory burned-in processor side secret to use. lol at being just "obfuscation" because you can spend $5m to decap and fetch the key then put the processor back into working order for the attack.

that just requires a vertically integrated device instead of a consumer part-swappable PC.

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kukrimate1y ago

What you are saying is sound, and I agree it could be done.

But there are multiple caveats: - How do you hide the secret so that only "legitimate" operating systems can use it for establishing their sessions and not "Mate's bootleg totally not malware live USB"? - And unfortunately current CPUs don't implement this. - Additionally don't be so smug to think you need to decap a CPU to extract on-die secrets. Fault injection attacks are very effective and hard to defend against.

I agree the security of this can somewhat be somewhat improved, but if you are building a custom CPU anyhow, you might as well move the TPM on-die and avoid this problem entirely.

logical_personOP1y ago

before the popularity of ARM SoCs that contain everything on-die there were much fewer choices for vertically integrated devices. it's a different segment.

if you look at apple's vertically integrated devices, they chose a cryptography coprocessor that was not on die originally. with a key accessible only by both pieces of silicon's trusted execution environments, rather than the operating system directly, encrypted comms are established in a similar fashion as the TPM2.0 proposal.

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