ZeroHour

Search: “Trusted Platform Module”

3 stories

TPMSpy: Validation of Measured Boot Systems by Low-Level Tracing of TPM Usage

Researchers present TPMSpy, a platform-agnostic method validating TPM Measured Boot via low-level tracing, finding inconsistent Linux systemd measurements that break remote attestation and LUKS decryption.

An arXiv paper (2609.05011) introduces TPMSpy, a method that analyzes virtualized system–TPM interactions to independently reconstruct and validate TPM Event Logs without relying on the quoting mechanism, applicable to open and closed systems and demonstrated on Linux and Windows. A longitudinal analysis of Linux systems running systemd versions 245–258 (2020–2025) found wide divergence in Measured Boot usage, undocumented behavioral changes, and no common usage pattern. The authors report inconsistent measurement of user-space systemd services, which prevents reliable remote attestation and LUKS disk decryption on affected systems.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoResearch

gr-PHYSEC: Real-time Channel-based Key Generation for Physical Layer Secure Wireless Communications

gr-PHYSEC GNU Radio module derives symmetric encryption keys from wireless channel randomness using a neural network, validated on robotic platforms with ADALM-Pluto SDRs.

The paper introduces gr-PHYSEC, a GNU Radio out-of-tree module for real-time physical-layer key generation that derives symmetric keys from the wireless channel's inherent randomness instead of pre-shared secrets. A trained neural network extracts channel features between trusted parties during probe exchanges; features are quantized into binary keys, reconciled via Reed-Solomon encoding, and secured with SHA-512 hashing before direct use for encryption. Real-world experiments at the FAU CAAI connected robotics testbed using ADALM Pluto software-defined radios and NVIDIA Jetson Orin demonstrated low key disagreement rates and NIST-verified randomness. Source code is publicly available on GitHub.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

Has anybody seen my keys? A key-hierarchy strategy for rack-level security

Oxide's RFD 0301 proposes a rack-level key hierarchy using Shamir secret sharing and a trust quorum to protect data-at-rest keys.

Oxide's request for discussion (RFD 0301) lays out a key-hierarchy strategy for rack-level security, deriving keys from a rack secret protected by Shamir secret sharing across a trust quorum of sleds, with keys exchanged over authenticated sprockets sessions. The document maps which keys protect control-plane data, metrics, Crucible extents, and authentication tokens, and defines open questions on key lifecycle, locality, and compromise handling. Future work includes sealing shares with the root of trust so an attacker would need to steal K whole sleds to reconstruct the rack secret.