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 private keys are generated and wonder why I don’t see people mention generating the public key from TPM where the private key is never accessible at all.
The problem with this is that the key would be “machine based” and not “person”
So it’s better for “service accounts”
Having read poetterings blog posts a bit and he explains that the TPM2 based encryption is entirely just for system resources (basically everything under
/with exception of/home). For home he still “envisions” (its already possible and not really hard with sd-homed) that the encryption is based on the users passphrase/key/whatever and not unlockable by anyone else than the users passphrase/…So user specific stuff is tied to user keys while system stuff is tied to the system & OS.
If you wanna read the post: https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html