On 29/11/14 19:53, Mick wrote: > I'm looking to buy a new PC and while looking at FM2+ MoBos I saw ASUS offers > one with a TPM feature. It also sells it as a separate component it seems: > > http://us.estore.asus.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=5793 > > I recall reading in this list about it, but I am not sure if it offers any > benefits to me as a user, or just adds a layer of complexity without any > substantial benefit. > > Your views and experience with this TPM thingy? >
one thing that is very useful is using tpm to feed random number generator $ time dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null bs=1 count=100 100+0 records in 100+0 records out 100 bytes (100 B) copied, 26.7494 s, 0.0 kB/s real 0m26.751s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.001s after starting trousers and rngd is much much much faster for real(er) random $ time dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null bs=1 count=100 100+0 records in 100+0 records out 100 bytes (100 B) copied, 0.000275625 s, 363 kB/s real 0m0.001s user 0m0.002s sys 0m0.000s it's also a safer place to drop keys into for example for use with grub trustedgrub and basically does "secureboot" without the need for uefi you can also use it to encrypt/decrypt *if* you trust it is not backdoored but does mean you can use it for LUKS instead of say a GPG crypted pass file - or you can have the tpm crypt your password into gibberish and then that gibberish phrase is the real password for LUKS
