this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

LUKS is still vulnerable to this attack if you enable autodecrypt using TPM. This attack is based on the vulnerability that the CPU and TPM communicates uses plain text. And it is a pretty common attack against TPM:

https://dolosgroup.io/blog/2021/7/9/from-stolen-laptop-to-inside-the-company-network

SPI is a communication protocol for embedded systems and is extremely common amongst virtually all hardware. Due to its simplicity, there is no encryption option for SPI. Any encryption must be handled by the devices themselves. At the time of this writing BitLocker does not utilize any encrypted communication features of the TPM 2.0 standard, which means any data coming out of the TPM is coming out in plaintext, including the decryption key for Windows

And apparently Linux is not doing too hot on this regard either:

https://www.secura.com/blog/tpm-sniffing-attacks-against-non-bitlocker-targets

As we can see, parameter encryption simply isn't used in practice, and except for safeboot none of the solutions enforce PIN/MFA by default.

However, this attack is not viable for device with firmware based solution, like fTPM, Microsoft Pluton, secure enclave etc. in these case TPM is part of the cpu, hence have no exposed pins to sniff their connection.


So if you don't want people with physical access to your computer (a thief or a evil maiden) to access everything on your disk, don't setup TPM auto decrypt.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (2 children)

CPU communicates with TPM in plaintext

Because of course

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

CPU doesn't have any secure storage, so it can't encrypt or authenticate comms to the TPM. The on-CPU fTPMs are the solution, the CPU then has the secure storage.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

That make sense, CPU has no place to store private keys, since that is the functionality of TPM...

Unless there is a firmware solution, which defeats the purpose of a standalone tpm.