“A pre-equipped attacker can perform this entire attack chain in less than 30 minutes with no soldering, simple and relatively cheap hardware, and publicly available tools,” the Dolos Group researchers wrote in a post, “a process that places it squarely into Evil-Maid territory.” After completing their analysis, the researchers said that the Microsoft advice is inadequate because it opens devices to attacks that can be performed by abusive spouses, malicious insiders, or other people who have fleeting private access.
The device cannot use a trusted platform module windows 10 password#
Microsoft recommends overriding the default and using a PIN or password only for threat models that anticipate an attacker with enough skill and time alone with an unattended target machine to open the case and solder motherboard devices. That meant the TPM was where the sole cryptographic secret for unlocking the drive was stored. The researchers noticed that, as is the default for disk encryption using Microsoft’s BitLocker, the laptop booted directly to the Windows screen, with no prompt for entering a PIN or password. With little else to go on, the researchers focused on the trusted platform module, or TPM, a heavily fortified chip installed on the motherboard that communicates directly with other hardware installed on the machine.
Can the attacker use it to hack your network? And let’s say an attacker manages to intercept the machine. And let’s say it comes preconfigured to use all the latest, best security practices, including full-disk encryption using a trusted platform module, password-protected BIOS settings, UEFI SecureBoot, and virtually all other recommendations from the National Security Agency and NIST for locking down federal computer systems. Let’s say you’re a large company that has just shipped an employee a brand-new replacement laptop.