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bri3dyesterday at 5:54 PM1 replyview on HN

> their own implementation of Trusted Boot which relies on the cryptography and secrets inside the SoC rather than TPM as in x86/UEFI boot process.

TPM and x86 trusted boot / root of trust are completely separate things, linked _only_ by the provision of measurements from the (_presumed_!) good firmware to the TPM.

x86 trusted boot relies on the same SoC manufacturer type stuff as in ARM land, starting with a fused public key hash; on AMD it's driven by the PSP (which is ARM!) and on Intel it's a mix of TXE and the ME.

This is a common mistake and very important to point out because using TPM alone on x86 doesn't prove anything; unless you _also_ have a root of trust, an attacker could just be feeding the "right" hashes to the TPM and you'd never know better.


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ValdikSSyesterday at 7:04 PM

On ARM, you control the whole boot process on many SoCs, and can make your own bespoke secure/trusted/measured boot chain, starting from bootrom to the very latest boot stages (given that your SoC manufacturer has root of trust and all the documentation on how to use it), without TPM.

You more or less can't do that on x86, and have to rely on existing proprietary code facilities to implement measured boot using TPM (as the only method), for which you can implement trusted boot, using TPM and all the previous measures proprietary code made to it.

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