This person asked if they can make PopOS secure via TPM.
I am saying that while yes, you can, there isnt much point, because setting up LUKS to work with TPM is inconvenient, easy to fuck up, and basically offers no additional protection against all but extremely implausible security scenarios for basically everyone other than bladed server room admins worried about corporate espionage who are for some reason running bare metal PopOS on their server racks.
Like the only actual use case I can see for this is /maybe/ having a LUKS encrypted portable backup drive, but even then you can still base the encryption key in the actual main pc’s harddrive without using tpm, though at /that and only that point/ are we approaching parity between the difficulty of using or not using tpm to accomplish this.
You didn’t know you could use it 30 minutes ago. It seems like you don’t know how it’s set up, what protection it does or does not offer, what the use cases might be, nor where any vulnerabilities may be. I’m wondering why you remain actively involved in the conversation with an opinion rather than sitting back and learning something new.
It offers convenience of not putting in an encryption passphrase at every boot, with reasonable security against a lost or stolen machine that nobody can just boot up a live usb and access the data. Its end-user behavior is like every other consumer operating system.
I think it even increases the security by not asking for the passphrase. Because the moment it asks, you know your machine has been tampered with and that you should be alert.
This person asked if they can make PopOS secure via TPM.
I am saying that while yes, you can, there isnt much point, because setting up LUKS to work with TPM is inconvenient, easy to fuck up, and basically offers no additional protection against all but extremely implausible security scenarios for basically everyone other than bladed server room admins worried about corporate espionage who are for some reason running bare metal PopOS on their server racks.
Like the only actual use case I can see for this is /maybe/ having a LUKS encrypted portable backup drive, but even then you can still base the encryption key in the actual main pc’s harddrive without using tpm, though at /that and only that point/ are we approaching parity between the difficulty of using or not using tpm to accomplish this.
You didn’t know you could use it 30 minutes ago. It seems like you don’t know how it’s set up, what protection it does or does not offer, what the use cases might be, nor where any vulnerabilities may be. I’m wondering why you remain actively involved in the conversation with an opinion rather than sitting back and learning something new.
It offers convenience of not putting in an encryption passphrase at every boot, with reasonable security against a lost or stolen machine that nobody can just boot up a live usb and access the data. Its end-user behavior is like every other consumer operating system.
I think it even increases the security by not asking for the passphrase. Because the moment it asks, you know your machine has been tampered with and that you should be alert.