TPM is basically never for your benefit. It’s becoming a requirement because Microsoft is going to one day say “you can only run apps installed from the Windows Store, because everything else is insecure” and lock down the software market. Valve knows this which is why they’re going so hard on the Steam Deck and Linux.
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This is why I keep my initrd tattooed as a barcode on my testicles.
“Please teabag the web cam to boot.”
Kernel upgrades are very… Painful.
There’s two types of users, those who write a detailed precise technical answer to the subject, and then there’s you
You know, I’ve been thinking about what I want my first tattoo to be for months, you’ve just given me a great idea
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I don’t know why I keep hearing of security measures to stop someone sleuthing into bootloaders.
Am I the only person using Linux who isn’t James Bond?
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so you never caught a team of government officials in your living room brute forcing your bootloader at 4am as you got up to use the bathroom, huh. Lucky guy.
I’m still on the hunt for a desktop Linux distro that has no security features or passwords. My usage for this may not be common but it can’t be rare enough that there are zero options
Ubuntu, no encryption, select boot to desktop by default when the system installs.
Like, really?
I’m an engineer with trade secrets on his laptop. I’ve heard of dozens of people getting laptops stolen from their cars that they left for like ten or fifteen minutes.
The chances are slims, but if it happens I’m in deep trouble whether those secrets leak of not. I’m not taking the risk. I’m encrypting my disk.
It’s not like there’s a difference in performance nowadays.
TPM’s not going to help with that situation, though, right? Either you’re typing in your encryption password on boot (in which case you don’t need TPM to keep your password), or you’re not, in which case the thief has your TPM module with the password in it.
TPM bad, put your secrets on a proper encryption peripheral, like a smartcard running javacardOS
TPM will turn into cpu-bound DRM, the more you use it, the more this cancer will grow
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You are only seeing what TPM is now. Not what TPM will become when it become an entire encrypted computing processor capable of executing any code while inspection is impossible.
Imagine denuvo running at ring level -1
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Trusting some obscure hardware might be a bad idea then.
Support for old software is now the only reason to use windows.
I’m a big fan of Linux, but I can’t believe you really think this.
Sadly, I agree. I’m at the point now where as long as I’m not trying to game I can thrive on Linux. But even then I spend way more time than necessary getting things to work that do so out of the box on Windows. We have a long way to go before legacy apps is the only reason to run it.
Personally I found the time I saved from not having any control over my system has more than made up for tinkering that I have to do to get things running. My laptop would regularly become unusable for 20+ minutes on windows because of disk performance issues, and I as the user had no means to prevent windows from running the service that locked everything up. That along with other times windows just decides your use case is less important have added up to far more time then having to debug a game here and there
Ungh, yeah I used to have that problem with my laptop when I was in college.
I only booted it up for classes unless I had a test coming up I needed to study for or something. Because why the fuck would I not do that - I had a regular computer at home for everything else.
Every couple weeks, that meant it was updating instead of being available for note taking, and usually for the entire hour I needed it. Because apparently setting the updates to run during shutdown wasn’t good enough, they needed to be run on boot, because fuck you that’s why.
Linux is just… hey I should probably update this shit at some point… meh, tomorrow.
We use the TPM pretty extensively with no Windows in the environment.
But with a reason, I’m sure. There’s no reason for the everyday consumer to need one, other than Microsoft wanting more control.
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.
There’s no downside to having it. There’s many downsides to not having it. This seems pretty cut and dry to me.
There’s no downside to having it.
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.
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?
https://hothardware.com/news/steam-deck-tpm-support-install-windows-11
I mean I generally agree with you, but the SteamDeck runs on an AMD processor with a fTPM that Valve slowly added support for.
It seems unlikely Valve will ever make Windows the primary OS for their devices. And they’d lose a lot of user support if they ever required the TPM for their own software, so hopefully they wouldn’t risk it.
Why does everybody seem to think that userspace attestation is the only use for the TPM? The primary use is for data to be encrypted at rest but decrypted at boot as long as certain flags aren’t tripped. TPM is great for the security of your data if you know how to set it up.
Valve is never going to require TPM attestation to use Steam, that’s just silly. Anti-cheat companies might, but my suggestion there is to just not play games that bundle malware.
Whatever is touted as the primary use doesn’t matter as much as what anti-user features it enables.
I doubt they would risk it as well, but the point is that it exists on the SteamDeck and can be utilized.
So what’s your point?
TPM is basically never for your benefit. It’s becoming a requirement because Microsoft is going to one day say “you can only run apps installed from the Windows Store, because everything else is insecure” and lock down the software market. Valve knows this which is why they’re going so hard on the Steam Deck and Linux.
This is the comment I was replying to. I was simply pointing out that for a company “going hard” on SteamDeck and Linux, it’s curious that they would spend any amount of effort at all enabling the TPM to allow people to run Windows. I guess my point is I don’t think they’re “going hard” quite as much as the person I responded to thinks.
Also it was just pointing out that this specifically can affect the SteamDeck since they use an AMD processor with AMD fTPM.
And now Imagine Linux had actually more market share on the Desktop. But for that, Linux needs at least a little more software support to be reliable for other people. And that software is usually not open source. Maybe with Flatpak, it will finally get somewhere in that regard, if there’s enough interest from people.
its not about the software support.
its because people are lazy to learn. most people dont even know that an OS can be different.
for them windows is defacto THE PC.
Sorry but that’s just wrong. Enough people simply don’t even consider Linux because their needed software doesn’t work + there’s no equivalent alternative. And my PC/OS is not a hobby or a Ideology. It’s a tool that I use to work with.
Is it really wrong? Do you have numbers? I think the most people claim above is at least plausible. It surely fits my personal experience, but that is of course not worth much.
I would argue that most people use their PC for web browsing, light photo editing and personal office stuff and maybe gaming (at least outside work) and those people are not affected by “the software I need does not work and there is no alternative”.
Your first point is web browsing. Even that doesn‘t work properly on a linux desktop lol. Browser performance is abysmal because the browsers lack out of the box support for hardware acceleration. Even if you get it to work it might not work reliably and an update might break it again.
Try using a discord call and open a youtube video in 4k at the same time on a a freshly installed linux desktop. The audio will be choppy and the video will drop frames like crazy. Just moving around windows on your desktop is not nearly as smooth as it is on windows.
You seem to be very misinformed. Browsers do not lack hardware acceleration. Some distributions do not include the necessary packets in their default configuration. Some. And when you get it to work, like in Arch Linux, where almost nothing is installed by default, it works flawlessly for years, never had an update breaking browser hardware acceleration.
I can run 12 4k youtube videos at the same time and route the audio to different channels of my different audio devices AND accept several calls from different webapps and the only thing that is not smooth is your way of discussing things LOL
I always just kill my TPM chip. It’s so obvious tpm will be used in the future for application offline DRM. They will executed encrypted operations under the TPM veil and decompilers will become unusable.
Just disabled it in BIOS/UEFI. Should I disable security device support too, or doesn’t it matter when fTPM is disabled?
Or depends what they mean by security service support. Presumably some kind of external (usb ?) device ?
I love how Torvalds always calls it like he sees it.
insert nvidia middle finger gif here
Inserted
I’ve had a weird system-wide stutter for months and the usual googling and troubleshooting didn’t help… omg. This might be it. Thank you Linus and thank you op.
I had it on my Windows 11 PC for a long time. I use this PC for music production and it was infuriating - the sound would just cut out intermittently like the computer couldn’t keep up. I tried lots of things, including an expensive CPU upgrade. In the end Asus released a new BIOS for the motherboard to address this AMD stutter, and that fixed it.
Which AGESA version?
Which AGESA version?
I don’t really know anything about that. Currently HWiNFO64 shows Microcode Update Revision A201025 and SMU Firmware Revision 56.74.0. I don’t know whether those are the numbers you’re asking for, or what they were while it was still having problems.
Thanks for the info! I’ll have to check that against what I’m using.
Based linus. Kill it, it’s pointless
“Maybe use it for the boot-time ‘gather entropy from different sources,’ but clearly it should not be used at runtime.”
Good idea. Ask it during boot/
insmodfor some hardware-random bits to seed Linux’s usual software-only CSPRNG, then just use that.And even that might not be a great idea. I wouldn’t be surprised if the fTPM RNG is subtly not-entirely-random, at some alphabet agency’s behest. I remember there being a controversy over
rdrandfor this reason…The fix with any possible issues with rdrand is the same here. When entropy is gathered from many sources including hardware instructions, any nefarious plant in the chip is drowned out in a sea of noise.
I’m no cryptographer, but that seems like an awfully dangerous assumption.
Well, it’s an fTPM, aka software, and AFAIK, no software can truly have a random RNG.
So it might be very good pseudo random at best.
It could be only mostly firmware, with a hardware RNG.
If not, and it uses a CSPRNG, then I don’t see much point in using it at all. Linux already has its own CSPRNG.
Would love this. I’m still getting the ftpm stutters and there’s no way to disable it in my motherboards bios.
Wow I’m surprised you can’t disable it. I can disable it on my desktop BIOS (Gigabyte X570S Pro AX) and my work laptop BIOS (Dell G15).
You use a Dell G15 for work?
I do, yeah.
What is it that you do?
Website developer, pretty standard job.
the module can cause intermittent stuttering, depending on which Ryzen processor you’re using. It appeared when the fTPM was in use, it would access its flash storage via a serial interface, and when doing so, held up activity by the rest of the system.
Could this be why I get stuttering in games after enabling TPM installing windows 11?
What is that needle with a ball stuck onto it? In the photograph. Someone please help.
Microphone from a headset.
