this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
930 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37691 readers
328 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
I'm afraid you are sorely mistaken. Here's an RCE vulnerability in the TPM 2.0 reference implementation.
Your own article says it’s VMs. The tpm itself can be bricked. Ok that sucks. Still not persistent like you describe.
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.