1. Go into your room and screw around with the boot loader to somehow give me unencrypted access to your laptop after you login next time.
2. Go into your room. Take your laptop. Put an identical looking laptop in place that runs software that boots and looks identical. Have it send me all of your password attempts over WiFi to my van in the parking lot.
I'm going with option 2 every time. I have your original device. I have your password. TPM, SecureBoot, or whatever is irrelevant at this point.
Legend goes that security oriented people will visually customize their machines with stickers (and their associated aging patina) and all kinds of digital cues on the different screens just to recognize if anything was changed.
MS chose to impose TPM because it allows encryption without interactive password typing (BitLocker without PIN or password which is what most machines are running). That's it. The users get all the convenience of not having to type extra passwords when the machine starts, and some (not all) of the security offered by encryption. Some curious thief can't just pop your drive into their machine and check for nudes. The TPM is not there to protect against NSA, or proverbial $5 wrench attacks but as a thick layer of convenience over the thinner layer of security.
Maybe I am mistaken, but I feel that the people going to such lengths to ward off an attacker and the people who’d want to rely on fTPM with Bitlocker over FOSS full disk encryption with a dedicated passphrase are two entirely separate circles.
> The TPM is not there to protect against NSA, or proverbial $5 wrench attacks but as a thick layer of convenience over the thinner layer of security.
I agree with you there, it is convenience, not security, but as such, should it be any more mandatory than any other convenience feature such as Windows Hello via fingerprint or IR? I’d argue only for newly released hardware, but don’t make that mandatory for existing systems.
Especially since I had one case where fTPM was not recognized, no matter what I did, despite it being enabled in the UEFI and showing up in Windows 10 and on Linux, I could not install 11.
Repeat until password is extracted.
