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Comment by ottah | Hacker News Reader

Ah, I see. It's just another fucking tpm, which let's venders approve or deny execution of signed binaries. So more infrastructure to attack general computing.

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No, TPMs and HSMs are fundamentally nothing more than secure hardware dedicated to storing private keys in a way that makes accessing the plaintext incredibly hard. All of modern computer security is based on them.

... and usually deployed in a user-hostile manner.

Any evidence of this? Computer security was a complete disaster before hardware roots of trust became standard.

> Computer security was a complete disaster

It is still a complete disaster. Nobody needs the password to your bootloader when it can access all your data through your web browser.

That isn't possible.

Both things can be true.

The knee-jerk hysterical reaction to any talk of hardware roots of trust on Hacker News is getting tiresome and I expect better given the reputation of the site. It actually reminds me of old slashdot.

The software running on such devices is usually proprietary and never installed by the user. That is user-hostile.

What software?

The firmware implementing TPM functionality, which definitely exists in at least some cases:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module#Field_...

For ASIC-only devices, the keys are burned-in, which is user-hostile too.

Is the firmware in my NIC user-hostile?

The firmware in one of my NICs for sure is. The vendor says they're not bothering to fix it, and nobody else is able to.

https://www.blackduck.com/blog/cyrc-discovers-asus-tplink-wl...

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