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

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.