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.
I use it for storing luks credentials, so every time I boot I get dropped at my login manager. It leaves my system vunerable to attacks to it, but its quite convenient.
Besides, if anyone tries to boot any other OS which is not mine, the keys are erased.
Can you explain a bit on how the key erasure works? AFAIK TPM only refuse to release the key when certain PCR dont match, is there a setting to let it erase key?
There are forensic tools that can capture the contents of RAM, and so access your decrypted LUKS encryption key.
I guess it depends on who you are protecting against, but if for example law enforcement wants evidence against you for what they think is a serious enough crime, they just may go through the trouble to do it.