tpm
14 posts tagged tpm.
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The Card That Wasn't a Card: How Windows Authentication Outgrew the Smart Card Metaphor
Smart cards, virtual smart cards, and Windows authentication 1996-2026: from PC/SC and PIV through the 2014 NTLM-secondary defect to WHfB and FIDO2.
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BitUnlocker: When Microsoft's Recovery Environment Becomes the Master Key
In July 2025, Microsoft's internal red team chained four CVEs in WinRE to bypass TPM-only BitLocker in under five minutes -- and the structural lesson is older than Windows 11.
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"The Vault is Solid. The Delivery Truck is Not." -- Microsoft Recall's Two-Year Re-Architecture from Plaintext SQLite to VBS Enclaves
How Microsoft Recall went from a plaintext SQLite database broken in four weeks to a VBS-Enclave + TPM-sealed + Hello-gated architecture, and what TotalRecall Reloaded still extracts. (Article title borrows Alexander Hagenah's framing, attributed in §8.1.)
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CNG Architecture: BCrypt, NCrypt, KSPs, and How Windows Picks Its Algorithms
A guided tour of the Cryptography API: Next Generation -- the two-tier API, the Key Storage Provider model, the FIPS toggle, and how PQC slots in.
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Apple Secure Enclave vs Microsoft Pluton: Two Roads to Hardware Root of Trust
How Apple SEP and Microsoft Pluton solve the same problem -- keeping your secrets safe from a compromised OS -- using two very different silicon strategies.
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Direct Anonymous Attestation: The Zero-Knowledge Proof Already in Every TPM
TPM 2.0 names a zero-knowledge group-signature primitive in its spec. A billion chips ship it. Almost nobody verifies it. The story of why DAA won every standardization fight and lost every deployment one.
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Inside the Primary Refresh Token: The Cryptographic Seam Between Windows Logon and Microsoft Entra ID
How one TPM-bound JWT issued at first sign-in bridges Windows logon and Microsoft Entra ID -- and how Pass-the-PRT taught Microsoft to bind the derivation to the message.
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Measured Boot: The TCG Event Log from SRTM to PCR-Bound BitLocker
How Windows turns every byte of firmware, every signed boot manager, and every loaded driver into a single 32-byte hash that decides whether BitLocker unlocks your disk -- and why patching that chain breaks it.
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Fuzzy Extractors and the One Inequality That Explains Why Windows Hello Doesn't Use One
Fuzzy extractors turn noisy biometrics into stable cryptographic keys. A single 2004 inequality explains why Windows Hello deliberately does not use one.
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Pluton: A TPM On Silicon Microsoft Can Patch
How Microsoft moved the TPM onto the SoC die, ran it on Rust firmware, and patched it through Windows Update -- and what that cost in trust centralisation.
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Secure Boot in Windows: The Chain From Sector Zero to Userinit, and Every Place It Has Broken
How Windows verifies and measures itself from CPU reset to logon, every rung of the boot chain, every public break, and what Pluton is being built to fix.
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The TPM in Windows: One Primitive, Twenty-Five Years, and the Chip Microsoft Bet On Twice
How a passive 1999 cryptoprocessor became the load-bearing pillar of Windows security, and what twenty-five years of attacks taught us about its limits.
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No Secrets to Steal: How Windows Hello Eliminated the Shared Secret
How Windows Hello replaced passwords with TPM-backed biometrics, survived a decade of attacks, and helped make passwordless the default.
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BitLocker on Windows: Architecture, Attacks, and the Limits of Full-Disk Encryption
How BitLocker evolved from an optional enterprise feature to encryption-by-default, its cryptographic architecture, every known attack, and what FDE still cannot protect against.