[dangero]

Depends on the use case. If boot requires a password, the computer can never lose power or be rebooted without human presence. That’s not always practical.

[teddyh]

You can reboot your full-disk-encryption server while you sleep. Obligatory plug: <https://www.recompile.se/mandos>

Disclosure: I am a co-author of Mandos.

[prennert]

Has this solution been audited? In particular, is it safe to replay attacks by actors listening in to the network traffic?

Also from the diagram it looks like the secret key is stored unencrypted on the server, or do I read it wrong?

[gerdesj]

Thank you for this. I will almost certainly be deploying that.

[prmoustache]

That is what remote kvm are for and if you do that on commodity hardware you can start a tiny ssh server starting up from an initrd. Having said that an attacker with local access could change the initrd without your knowledge so that it logs the password you enter so it is not necessarily the most secure solution.

[deno]

You’ve answered it yourself. Without TPM you have no idea if you can provide the secret to the system or if it’s compromised. Whether that secret comes from TPM or network is secondary.

[tucnak]

Google: IPMI, BMC