The much maligned “Trusted Computing” idea requires that the party you are supposed to trust deserves to be trusted, and Google is DEFINITELY NOT worthy of being trusted, this is a naked power grab to destroy the open web for Google’s ad profits no matter the consequences, this would put heavy surveillance in Google’s hands, this would eliminate ad-blocking, this would break any and all accessibility features, this would obliterate any competing platform, this is very much opposed to what the web is.

  • beefcat@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    you need a Microsoft signed stub to boot anything other than Windows on a PC

    Not necessarily, most motherboards and laptops (at least every single one I’ve ever owned) allow users to enroll their own Secure Boot keys and maintain an entirely non-Microsoft chain of trust. You can also disable secure boot entirely.

    Major distros like Ubuntu and Fedora started shipping with Microsoft-signed boot shims as a matter of convenience, not necessity.

    Secure Boot itself is not some nefarious mechanism, it is a component of the open UEFI standard. Where Microsoft comes in to play is the fact that most PC vendors are going to pre-enroll Microsoft keys because they are all shipping computers with Windows, and Microsoft wants Secure Boot enabled by default on machines shipping with with their operating system.

    • Saturnlks@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Windows 11 is saying you’re required to have tpm 2.0 enabled in your bios in order to upgrade. Didn’t know what it was on my self built computer until recently when windows said my system wasn’t compatible to upgrade.

      • beefcat@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        TPM and SecureBoot are separate UEFI features. Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0. If your system meets the CPU requirements, then it should support this without needing to install a hardware TPM dongle. However, until recently, many vendors turned had this feature turned off for some reason.

        Where some confusion comes in is another Windows 11 requirement, that machines be SecureBoot capable. What this actually means in practice is that your system needs to be configured to boot in UEFI mode rather than CSM (“Legacy BIOS”) mode.

      • Hexorg@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Tpm modules are pretty good. And you can buy them separately like another card. Motherboards usually have a slot for them. They are tiny like usb drives. They essentially are usb derives but for your passwords and keys. You can even configure Firefox to store your passwords in tpm

        • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          TPMs are a security threat. If malware manages to infiltrate it, then that malware is now impossible to remove and has unfettered access to the entire system. You have to junk the entire computer.

          • Hexorg@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            No they don’t. Worst case known attacks have resulted in insecure keys being generated. And even if malware could somehow be transferred out of it you wouldn’t have to trash your whole computer - just unplug the TPM

              • Hexorg@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                Your own article says it’s VMs. The tpm itself can be bricked. Ok that sucks. Still not persistent like you describe.

                • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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                  1 year ago

                  The vulnerability is not specific to VMs. Malicious code running with privileges on the host operating system can also exploit it.

                  But yes, this can also be used to escape the VM sandbox, and since the TPM has full access to the entire system, exploit code can then gain full privileges on the host.

                  Can the TPM firmware not write to the flash where it’s stored? If it can, then an RCE exploit can do so too, and thereby make itself persistent.

                  Basically, any successful RCE exploit in a TPM equals total and permanent compromise of the entire physical machine. That’s why the TPM is a security threat rather than a security feature.

      • beefcat@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Microsoft doesn’t control the standard, and the entire rest of the industry has no reason to ban non-Windows operating systems.

        Widnows doesn’t have the stranglehold over the market that it once did.

          • Scrath@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            The entire internet depends on machines running linux as servers. I highly doubt that any company has the power to change that

    • Gsus4@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      You can’t disable secure boot if you want to use your Nvidia GPU :( though. [edit2: turns out this is a linux mint thing, not the case in Debian or Fedora]

      Edit: fine, there may be workarounds and for other distros everything is awesome, but in mint and possibly Ubuntu and Debian for a laptop 2022 RTX3060 you need to set up your MOK keys in secure mode to be able to install the Nvidia drivers, outside secure mode the GPU is simply locked. I wasn’t even complaining, there is a way to get it working, so that’s fine by me. No need to tell me that I was imagining things.

      • beefcat@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        My experience is that Nvidia plays nicer without secure boot. Getting Fedora up and running with the proprietary Nvidia drivers and fully working SecureBoot was quite a headache, whereas everything just worked out of the box when I disabled it.

        But this is very much an Nvidia problem and not a SecureBoot problem. There is a reason basically no-one else provides their drivers as one-size-fits-all binary kernel modules.

        • Gsus4@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          Me installing Linux Mint on a 2022 laptop with a Nvidia GPU (had windows 11 preinstalled, this was an alongside install). I disabled secure boot at first, but still had to go all the way back and set up my MOK keys and turn on secure boot properly with another password to unlock the GPU.

              • wim@lemmy.sdf.org
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                1 year ago

                Literally buy anything but Nvidia. Intel, AMD have upstream drivers that work regardless of secure boot. Various ARM platforms also have free drivers.

                It used to be that there waa only bad choices, now there really is only one bad choice left.

                Intel Arc still has some teething problems, particularly with power management on laptops, but AMD has been smooth sailing for almost a decade now.

          • sunbeam60@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            What does that even mean?! Yes it works for me. That’s the whole bloody point of saying it. Someone was saying “it won’t work for anyone” and I was saying “well it works for me”.

            “We can’t land at the moon!” “Eh, we already have” “‘Works for me’, so that’s not really valid”

            Head_scratch.gif