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Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Data encryption and decryption without entering a password is a pretty darn good reason.
Sure, but does a grandmother's Solitaire & Facebook PC really need quick encrypting and decrypting? Anyone not dealing with sensitive info doesn't need one.
Yes, because they are the least likely to know they are a part of a botnet
How would at-rest encryption make it less likely that your computer joins a botnet, or more likely that you'd notice if it did?
There's no downside to having it. There's many downsides to not having it. This seems pretty cut and dry to me.
Sure there are. If it gets compromised with malicious code, I have no way of removing it.
I can protect ring 0. I can keep crap out of ring 0. If all else fails, I can nuke everything in ring 0 and boot a fresh OS installation. But I can't do a single bleeping thing except throw out the whole machine if malware takes over ring -1.
This is already the case with your motherboard firmware, which fTPM is a part of. You are correct in that you have no real way to handle malware in it except throw it away. This doesn't change in any way if you get rid of TPM.
It decreases the attack surface.