when it launched Windows 11 confused a lot of people over its requirement that
your pc have a security chip called a tpm or a trusted platform module but now
microsoft wants to transition away from the tpm and instead implement its own
security chip inside of upcoming cpus
microsoft calls this new chip pluton
but why is this a big deal it helps to first understand the limitations of the
current tpm system tpms contain the keys
needed to encrypt and decrypt data on your devices and they can either come in
the form of a separate chip that sits on your motherboard you can actually buy
them for for your desktop or as a firmware tpm which consists of code that
hangs out either on your system's chipset or on the CPU itself most CPU
platforms manufactured these days have some form of firmware tpm built in hence
the reason microsoft says you're probably okay to upgrade to Windows 11
if you have a recently built pc but tpm
is far from perfect it's certainly better than nothing but it turns out
it's not particularly hard to defeat if an attacker knows what they're doing a
key weakness can be found in the connection between the tpm and the BIOS
you can actually connect a sniffing device to the pins on the tpm chip and
obtain the key you're looking for in a matter of minutes of course you need
physical access to the target pc in order to pull off an attack like this
but seeing as how the tpm was meant to help protect computers even if a
miscreant had physical access it's a pretty big liability
but say you're running a firmware tpm implementation well
these can still have their own vulnerabilities the well-publicized
spectre and meltdown exploits have shown that attackers can grab data directly
off a CPU even if that data is subject to enhanced security it can still be
obtained such as in the platypus attack that bypasses Intel software guard
extensions or sgx this feature is supposed to create a secured area of the
processor but not only does platypus defeat it physical access isn't even
required to attack the secured area
pluton is in theory i just love that name supposed to go a long way toward
solving these problems pluton doesn't use a separate chip at all instead it's
baked directly onto the CPU die so there
isn't a risk of snatching data off a communication bus like you can with a
discrete tpm module but how is pluton different from firmware tpm since those
also run directly on the CPU we'll tell you right after we thank
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so a firmware tpm runs its code on the same main CPU cores that run your other
programs so a successful attack on something else the CPU is running could
compromise the firmware tpm pluton on the other hand works by adding
additional hardware that's on the CPU die but is separate from the main
processing cores making it more difficult to attack even if the bad guy
has physical access to the computer additionally microsoft is going to be
responsible for issuing firmware updates for pluton rather than motherboard
manufacturers who typically release new firmware versions
much less frequently this should help keep computers safer from new and
evolving threats the first pcs with pluton built in should start hitting
store shelves in mid 2022 but pluton actually isn't even brand new the chips
have actually been used since 2013 in xbox consoles to make it harder to play
pirated titles which actually brings us to a concern some users have about
pluton some fear that microsoft could use pluton to lock down pcs and exert
too much control over what consumers can and cannot run on their own machines we
do know that cpus with pluton will work
and run on Linux but if you want pluton's extra features the specific
Linux distro you're using would need to be enable support for those so the only
time we'll tell if these concerns about fluton are warranted but i'm sure we can
all agree that we trust microsoft right they made vista thanks for watching guys
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