this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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Well I have good news for you, the TPM can't do those things. The TPM is just a hardware module that stores cryptographic keys in a tamper-resistant chip, and can perform basic crypto functions.
In of itself, it can't be addressed remotely, but it is usually used as a component of a greater security scheme. For example, in full disk encryption, it can be used to ensure that disk can't be decrypted on a different device.
There's been a lot of FUD surrounding TPMs, and it doesn't help that the actual explanation of their function isn't something easily described in a couple of sentences.
There's no reason to be afraid of a TPM, and for the privacy-minded and security-conscious, it can even be used as part of a greater security scheme for your device and its data.
Of course at the same time, it's not a feature most home users would make full use of, and as for not liking Windows, carry on. There's plenty of reasons to avoid it if those things are important to you
May I ask a question out of curiosity? If my system dies on a hardware level, and I have to save my hard drive, how can I access it then if I can't put it in another system?
Generally commercial drive encryption solutions, like Bitlocker, usually has a backup recovery key that can be used to access the encryption key if your TPM is reset, or if your device dies.
So I guess the short answer is most of these solutions don't fully protect it from being moved to another device, they just add another layer of security and hassle that makes it harder to do. And without the TPM as part of these solutions, you would be entering a 48-character passphrase every time you boot your device, which has several security flaws of its own.
The TPM specification is an open standard by the Trusted Computing Group, and there are certification organizations that will audit many of these products, so that's a good place to begin.
As with any of the hardware in your device, it does require some amount of trust in the manufacturers you have chosen. These same concerns would apply to anything from the onboard USB controllers to the CPU itself. There's no way to be absolutely certain, but you can do your due diligence to get a reasonable level of confidence.
This is a reasonable thing to think about, although very few individuals are qualified to understand and audit the source code of encryption software either, so in most cases you are still putting your faith in security organizations or the community to find issues.
When it comes to security, it often comes with a trade-off. Hardware devices can achieve a level of security that software can't completely reproduce, but they are a lot harder to audit and verify their integrity.
In any case, the TPM is something that software solutions have to explicitly call in the first place, it isn't something that activates itself and starts digging into your hard drive. Which means if you don't want to use it in your security solution, then it will sit there and do nothing. You can keep using your encryption keys in clear memory, visible to any privileged software.
I don't know specifically about the XBox and how it uses it, but the TPM absolutely can be used as part of a DRM scheme. Since the TPM can be used to encrypt data with a key that can't be exported, it could be part of a means to hinder copying of content. Of course this content still has to be decrypted into memory in order to be used, so people looking to defeat this DRM usually still can. DRM as a whole is often shown to be a pretty weak solution for copy protection, but companies won't stop chasing it just the same.