Notices by Jarkko Sakkinen (jarkko@social.kernel.org)

James Bottomley posted new version of the #HMAC encryption patches for #TPM2: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-integrity/20231127190854.13310-1-James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com/T/#t

I spent some time refactoring the tpm_buf changes because they were the major glitch for me in the earlier versions, and those patches have been included now to this series, which is of course great. The series is probably rather sooner than later ready for inclusion to the mainline.

This adds up to the TPM2 sealed hard drive encryption by mitigating bus interposers by a factor. An interposer anything interface the traffic between the CPU and a discrete TPM chip (i.e. not firmware TPM).

A bus interposer can reset a TPM and replay PCR’s as the chip returns to its initial state including PCRS. To mitigate this, kernel creates HMAC session for each TPM transaction and derives session key from the so.called null hierarchy, which essentially provides a new random seed per TPM reset.

Therefore, interposer’s ability to reset TPM decreases because kernel will not be able to communicate with the TPM and that way indirectly a malicious act can be detected by far better chances than ever before.

IMHO, this fits quite nicely to the stuff that #OpenSUSE and #Ubuntu have been working on lately.

I switched to #helix editor because three advantages weight me more than disadvantage of having to learn away for #vim shortcuts:

1. Too much legacy.
2. Too many plugins.
3. It is a varying challenge to install the latest version #neovim, which anyway needs to be done in order not to break init.lua (and that big pile of plugins).

So for the price of few weeks inconvenience I can stop spending time on text editor configuration and/or figuring out on how to install it.

I used #vim and later on neovim fo the period 1998-2023, even before using Linux. I switched to vim in MS-DOS from text editor called #QEDIT :-)

Installing #rustup:

E.g.

Just though that good to write this up since I see some distributions packaging rustup, which makes no sense (for #rustc and #cargo it does for obvious reasons).

It is also totally safe to run rustup this way kudos to the amazing #TLS 1.2.

#rustlang

I’d consider rewriting it with Rust and adr-hal.