logoalt Hacker News

sq_today at 1:22 AM1 replyview on HN

Yeah, fair enough. "Compliance" is probably the phrasing I should've used, rather than "security".

I've been curious for a while about the overall taxonomy of security, especially for embedded platforms. It seems like the only hope is defense in depth, given the power glitching attacks and the like that you can find demonstrated.

Specific to the Raspberry Pi, I believe I even saw a thread at some point where one of their firmware engineers was making the case that secure boot on the Pi 5 was equivalent to a TPM in almost any reasonable threat model, since, in either case, you were out of luck if an attacker had physical access and was willing to put in enough effort.


Replies

bradfatoday at 9:19 AM

Normal secure boot does not use the TPM. Secure boot is the proactive process of ensuring only allowed code loads and executes.

The TPM is used for measured boot, the post process to understand what actually was booted and if the right set of things were booted then to allow unlocking of specific items like keys.

Both are important but they are not the same thing.