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Re: A _good_ and valid use for TPM


From: Alex Besogonov
Subject: Re: A _good_ and valid use for TPM
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:46:14 +0200

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 12:03 AM, Isaac Dupree
<address@hidden> wrote:
>> I know. But there's no way to guard against this attack, so there's no
>> sense fretting over it for now.
> well, it's relatively straightforward for an attacker who knows what they're
> doing, so perhaps you should assume that *privacy* is at least partly
> compromised.
I think there are ways to guard against this attack. There's 'freeze
CPU cache' method and I'm also thinking about using GPU to perform
decryption - this way decryption keys won't be in the main memory.

For now, I'm just planning to glue memory chips to the mainboard using
epoxy resin. It'll make life much harder for the attacker.

> but the most that attack can achieve is observing?  Can that attack make it so
> that, when the system starts running again, it will be in a compromised state?
Attackers can steal decryption keys, connect hard drives from my
computer to their computer and then copy everything.

> - they can steal all crypto identity keys and try to run a completely 
> different
> computer with different software there, if not for TPM
> - I don't know how the magic of TPM knowing everything about the state of your
> computer works, maybe they can modify what's in memory and put it back and
> confuse things?
No. TPM is a passive chip.

It might be possible to use TPM as a hardware decryptor, but it's too
slow to handle full-disk encryption.

> Also why does GRUB need to do any explicit interaction with TPM?  (I'm
> ignorant and unimportant here, but maybe it will edify people, to have this
> conversation.)
BIOS is only able to attest that the first stage of GRUB (512-byte
MBR) is not compromized. First stage then has to check the second
stage and so on. So unmodified GRUB will happily load a compromised
second stage even if the first stage is attested to be not modified.




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