I’m curious about the possible uses of the hardware Trusted Protection Module for automatic login or transfer encryption. I’m not really looking to solve anything or pry. I’m just curious about the use cases as I’m exploring network attached storage and to a lesser extent self hosting. I see a lot of places where public private keys are generated and wonder why I don’t see people mention generating the public key from TPM where the private key is never accessible at all.
Personally, I don’t see how a TPM module is more useful than full disk encryption with a password you enter on boot.
I struggle to see how it makes automatic login safer given it does nothing to protect against the really common threat of someone physically stealing your laptop or desktop.
I don’t trust any encryption or authentication system that I don’t have access to the keys for. Microsoft has also kinda made me feel it’s more for vendor lock in, like they did with secure boot.
Still, I’m probably being unreasonably pessimistic about it though - be interested to see any practical use cases of it.
The key is only released into ram, so unless the thief can read content from ram they cannot easily decrypt your disk. And most common thief probably do not have that ability.
That being said, you do need a login password to prevent the thief straight up booting into your OS and copy everything using the file manager…
One of the advantage of using TPM with FDE, is that you can use a much longer random password. If I dont use TPM I am forced to use a password I can remember, which is likely the same password I use somewhere else. This means if someone close to me stole my laptop, they will have reasonable chance of guessing my password.
You can use insecure boot and not enter the password. It can’t make stuff meaningfully more secure though, it just plain doesn’t add any protection against evil maid.
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