Comment by rasengan
9 hours ago
> TPM-backed full-disk encryption
This is going to be very useful for servers hosted in third party DCs.
9 hours ago
> TPM-backed full-disk encryption
This is going to be very useful for servers hosted in third party DCs.
Keeping the key in the same room as the padlock only protects against casual drive theft and secure disposal.
Personally I'm more worried about someone stealing the entire server or a local threat actor.
Sure, keep TPM to help with boot integrity, maybe even a factor for unlock, but things like Clevis+Tang (or Bitlock Network Unlock for our windows brethren) is essential in my opinion.
The beta installer was completely unsuccessful in setting the TPM-backed disk encryption on both a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Intel 258V) and a ThinkPad P14s (AMD 300-something). Hopefully they ironed that part out in the release, but it seems still early for this feature (at least for my comfort level).
Same on my Framework Desktop. Looks like it works only with a limited number of TPM chips for now.
The constructed policy is quite strict and expects certain UEFI things to be set up correctly. For example both this https://github.com/canonical/secboot/blob/7434bac27844362ff8... and https://github.com/canonical/secboot/blob/7434bac27844362ff8... are enabled in the policy. The policy choices and various early checks, even as trivial as confirming that the TCG log content is correct after booting into installation system, are enough to rule out a lot of potentially problematic EFI deployments. Effectively making it more strict helps avoid a lot of funny issues where the firmware is clearly buggy and things would fall apart sooner or later.
1 reply →
I want this on my own homeserver. Protection against someone stealing the server without requiring me to type a password every boot.
In what way is TPM protecting your data if someone steals the entire server? TPM only ensures that the boot environment has not been modified. Whatever key is being used to automatically decrypt the disk would be in the clear.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your situation, I think you should look up the "Evil Maid Attack" to better understand how to mitigate risk for your threat model.
assuming there are no bugs in linux and you enable full memory encryption in BIOS, it protects you in the same way the FBI cant get into a locked iphone they physically posess
but linux is not as secure as an iphone, and linux users typically dont know how to set this up, so in practice you are right, it doesnt protect you
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oh man i hope this works on dell laptops