On Saturday, 12 December 2020 17:11:28 CET David Niklas wrote:

Hi, It has been a while since I posted. Today I have bad news. Apparently, M$ has been working with AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to place a new type of TPM into their CPUs, APUs, and SoCs. It's already inside of the new XBox processors. It runs firmware which is, according to M$, produced by them.

Here's an official link, and a tech site link for those of you who don't want to visit M$'s site.

https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2020/11/17/meet-the-microsoft-pluton -processor-the-security-chip-designed-for-the-future-of-windows-pcs/

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16269/microsoft-pluton-hardware-security-comi ng-to-our-cpus-amd-intel-qualcomm

I've done some research googling, but at this stage the data on what sort of access this new processor has and what it can do is anyones best guess.

It sounds like the firmware might have unrestricted Internet access: "One of the other major security problems solved by Pluton is keeping the system firmware up to date across the entire PC ecosystem."

I hope I'm panicking unnecessarily...

It's just Microsoft being Microsoft, I imagine. Ignore all the people who claim "Microsoft has changed" because "Microsoft likes open source" plus all the people who even go as far as to deny that Microsoft ever did bad stuff in the past [*].

I also imagine that Microsoft doesn't like the look of things like this:

https://opentitan.org/

Which, having looked at it only yesterday, was the first thing I was reminded of.

Paul

[*] Bad stuff as in demanding licensing fees for each Intel processor shipped regardless of what the processor or system was running, coercing computer manufacturers into exclusive agreements that forbade them from supplying other operating systems, incorporating other people's software into their operating system without permission, and so on.

On Sat, Dec 12, 2020 at 4:12 PM David Niklas doark@mail.com wrote:

It sounds like the firmware might have unrestricted Internet access: "One of the other major security problems solved by Pluton is keeping the system firmware up to date across the entire PC ecosystem."

I hope I'm panicking unnecessarily...

well, the decision to "panic" has nothing to do with the external stimuli, if that's what you mean. so one good answer would be, unequivocably, "yes" :)

oh you mean, "is this something that should be of concern and warrant attention" - yes, that would seem to be the case. signed treacherous operating systems... yeah.

i'll forward it to people i know.

l.