[osy]

This is not the way TPMs are used by most of the industry. For example, Microsoft and now Canonical are advertising it as a way to do FDE which Microsoft has known to be broken since 2006. They are requiring it for Windows 11 because of "security" and have provided no software feature on Windows for this kind of use case. It is only done by the OSS community.

> The other useful application is to prevent block device data extraction without knowing the passkey.

Nope, read the appendix. Since 2006, BitLocker without PIN is vulnerable to physical extraction with $80 worth of equipment. And to enable enhanced PIN for BitLocker you have to jump to a lot of hoops that most people don't even know about.

[lxgr]

> This is not the way TPMs are used by most of the industry. [...] It is only done by the OSS community.

So some industry stakeholders are doing bad things with an inherently neutral technology. Does that mean we need to get rid of the entire thing, thereby also killing the OSS use cases?

Yes, trusted computing can be used in user-hostile ways, but the solution here seems to be to not use OSes and applications using it in that way, rather than throwing out the technology as a whole.

[AnthonyMouse]

The trouble is we keep conflating two different things.

Something that works like a hardware security module, where it stores your keys and tries to restrict who can access them, has some potential uses. The keys are only in your own device, so someone can't break an entirely different device or a centralized single point of failure to get access. And this can't be used against the user because both the device and the key itself are still fully in their control -- they could put a key in the HSM and still have a copy of it somewhere else to use however they like.

Whereas anything that comes with a vendor's keys installed in it from the factory is both malicious and snake oil. Malicious because it causes the user's device to defect against them and some users aren't sophisticated enough to understand this or bypass it even if malicious attackers can, and snake oil because you can't rely on something for actual security if a break of any device by anyone anywhere could forge attestations, since that is extremely likely to happen and has a long history of doing so.