I’m curious about the possible uses of the hardware Trusted Protection Module for automatic login or transfer encryption. I’m not really looking to solve anything or pry. I’m just curious about the use cases as I’m exploring network attached storage and to a lesser extent self hosting. I see a lot of places where public...
Personally, I don’t see how a TPM module is more useful than full disk encryption with a password you enter on boot.
I struggle to see how it makes automatic login safer given it does nothing to protect against the really common threat of someone physically stealing your laptop or desktop.
I don’t trust any encryption or authentication system that I don’t have access to the keys for. Microsoft has also kinda made me feel it’s more for vendor lock in, like they did with secure boot.
Still, I’m probably being unreasonably pessimistic about it though - be interested to see any practical use cases of it.
I’ve heard that before, but there are two main problems that stick out to me:
A lot of the marketing for TPM (at least when I was setting up bitlocker on Windows) suggests that it’s used to support decrypting drives without a password on boot. But that doesn’t seem to offer any protection from the devices being stolen. The bootloader may be safe but it’s not actually verifying that I’m the one booting the device.
I can’t think of a situation where someone would be able to actually modify the bootloader without also having full access to the files and secrets. Especially in a single-boot environment where every time the system is running, the device is decrypted.
I’m not saying that it’s all just a scam or anything like that, but it really feels like I’m missing something important and obvious.
I can’t see that being a reasonable approach for them to take, tbh. One option with TPM is that your system logs in automatically to the desktop, in which case they can just turn it on and use it normally. The other is that it requires a password at some point during startup, to which they could just use a (hardware) keylogger.
Heya, been hearing about NixOS for a long time now, mostly from the peeps over at the Linux Unplugged podcast. So was thinking about jumping onto the nix-train, however it seems like it has a learning curve. Does anyone have any good learning resources, blog-posts, guides, whatever beans that you used to get started with NixOS?...
I’ve actually been getting into NixOS recently; interested in replacing an old server I’ve had for like 10 years with something I can just build from a bunch of config files.
Can confirm it is confusing and I have no idea how anything works. :D
In my searches, I’ve come across nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/ , which I’ve gone through a few chapters of - seems good so far.
I’ve tried both LMDE and Debian itself, but I think I just ended up frustrated at the age of software in the repos and how much stuff relies on Ubuntu specific stuff.
Way back in the day I was an Ubuntu user, but then everyone simultaneously decided that gnome 2 was too old and that touch interfaces were the priority. So I now use Mint and Cinnamon.
Wow, I worded that poorly. I meant that a lot of software not in the repos (usually proprietary apps) provide a .deb download tailered for Ubuntu rather than base Debian.
Is anyone here using their hardware TPM chips for credentials?
I’m curious about the possible uses of the hardware Trusted Protection Module for automatic login or transfer encryption. I’m not really looking to solve anything or pry. I’m just curious about the use cases as I’m exploring network attached storage and to a lesser extent self hosting. I see a lot of places where public...
NixOS beginner resources
Heya, been hearing about NixOS for a long time now, mostly from the peeps over at the Linux Unplugged podcast. So was thinking about jumping onto the nix-train, however it seems like it has a learning curve. Does anyone have any good learning resources, blog-posts, guides, whatever beans that you used to get started with NixOS?...
What distros have you tried and thought, "Nope, this one's not for me"?
I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.