Should We Be Afraid of TPM Chips?

AcidArrow asks: "I was looking to buy a new laptop and since I wanted to be on the bleeding edge, I thought one with the new core duo chips would be just what I need. Among the features on the laptops I was looking was 'Trusted Platform Module chip for the safety of your data'. Now, I don't know of any real uses for a TPM chip yet, but is this something that should worry me, or keep me from buying a laptop with said 'feature'? I don't intend to use it and I would like to disable it, if possible, but I don't want to make it easier for anyone to track down what I'm doing on my laptop."

Comments

Uses

[TheRealMindChild]

TPM in itself isn't bad. It is when it is grossly abused is the concern.

I would imagine if you want to use future version of windows (and/or media player), this chip will be necessary. I can only speculate that it aids in the decryption of copywrited content

Re:Uses

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it NOT bad when your personal computer, to which you entrust essentially all your documents, can hide software and data from you?

It is Big Brother Inside. Invisible, omnipresent, and with an enhanced ability to hide backdoors that will even grab your encrypted communications when they go in the clear inside your PCs.

But, hey, you are probably a law-abiding person and should have nothing to hide.

Re:Uses

[Trelane]

but also the very real (and currently being implemented by Microsoft) threat of massive privacy abuse, survellence and near-total control it allows, instead of just spouting meaningless "It's not evil. It's just hardware" platitudes then, perhaps things will improve.

That's basically what I said, save for the gross misrepresentation, namely "just spouting meaningless 'It's not evil. It's just hardware' platitudes"

Your (apparently) blind hatred for all things TPM seems to have skipped the "currently being implemented by Microsoft" detail of the "threat of massive privacy abuse, survellence and near-total control it allows". You seem to acknowledge the fact that it requires additional OS and/or app support for the abuses part while totally ignoring this same fact anywhere else!

If you don't have access to the keys, then this is not about security" -- Alan Cox.

Quite true, but you have the keys, with the notable exception of the TPM's itself. Theoretically it never leaves the chip and isn't recorded anywhere, but again why I said you had to trust the chip vendor too....

The only additional piece of the puzzle we're missing is the BIOS bootloader verification. Here is likely one of your objections, particularly the keys objection. Never buy a TPM-enabled computer if you cannot sign your own bootloader, for what are likely (to us at least) obvious reasons.

Now why am I having a fight with an AC? Post from a real account or else thread over.

Re:Uses

[Sique]

There are issues with TPM vs. free software you didn't address. What if the kernel you want to boot doesn't have a signature the TPM module recognizes? If you or some friend or colleague of you modify a kernel, then its signature changes (that's the whole point of signed binaries). So what if you TPM module just refuses to boot from a signature it doesn't know?

What if the device is something like a digital video recorder or a wireless router, which in theory runs under Linux or other GPLed software, and you should be able to change the code according to your wishes, but because you don't have a key the TPM module trusts, you can't sign your changes, and the TPM module tells the BIOS not to boot your binary? It might be not with the general purpose computer for now, but on specialized hardware it's pretty possible. The hardware vendor will just tell you that he has to sign all changes, and what use is the GPL for the software to you, if you can't run your modifications without the vendor's agreement? You are back to square 1, this time not fiddling with copyright, but with the TPM module, and no clever licensing gets you out of the trouble.

So what about running for example other software than Mac OS X on new Apple-Intel hardware, if the BIOS just wants Apple's signature on the kernel binary? As the previous poster already said: If you don't have the keys to your computer, you are not in control of your computer. It doesn't need the malice of the OS designer, it can be already be in the BIOS.

Be afraid only if you can't use it ..

[torpor]

.. yourself, personally, for your own uses. If the TPM 'feature' is only something that a mfr, or software vendor, can exploit to protect data, then its something that you definitely don't want to use.

But if there were uses for TPM which directly translated into a user feature - like being able to save .DOC files to your USB stick, encrypted to your own TPM serial, for example - then I would say yeah, its something that can be used.

But frankly, TPM isn't there for you. Its there for software vendors and 'media suppliers' to use in branding content to your machine. Whether thats good or not, is entirely up to whether or not the end user wants less control over where the data can travel .. so far, the only use for it appears to be in keeping MP3 and other Media files, which you did not author, local to your own machine.

I'd be interested to hear cases where TPM-stamps can be used to actually protect user-author'ed data, though. Would be handy for studio-type people .. like, if I could get my Cubase/Protools session files stamped specifically to my machine, and they can't be used anywhere else, under certain circumstances that could be very handy ..

But that sort of protection is just as easily provided by tools like GPG and such, and still would depend on the software vendor exploiting that feature, so .. yeah .. it just goes round and round.

Re:Be afraid only if you can't use it ..

[HaloZero]

But if there were uses for TPM which directly translated into a user feature - like being able to save .DOC files to your USB stick, encrypted to your own TPM serial, for example - then I would say yeah, its something that can be used.

I can safely say that I do not want this. I use my jumpdrive to keep a backup of three directories; a script automagically copies fresh versions of a particular tree into a branch on my jumpdrive. This is done for portability and backup purposes. If, for example, my .doc and .mpp and *.* files were encrypted with my ThinkPad's TPM serial, then recovery from another machine (lets say that my laptop is stolen, or otherwise destroyed [with fire]) is pointless - there's no way to replicate that serial.

Long story short: TPM serialization == bad for backups.