| TPM is not designed to prevent intrusion from hackers, it's designed to turn your general purpose computer into an appliance by preventing you, the owner, from modifying the OS in your computer as you see fit (and interact with third party services at the same time, thanks to remote attestation). It means that instead of _just patching_ the software in your computer to customize it now you have to resort to using 0days to do it like a criminal which makes it considerably harder. It does help against hackers, of course, and the same restrictions do secure you against some attacks (evil maid attacks) but that's not the intent. The threat model TPM protects against is: - You log in into Netflix (or whatever) - Netflix sends your PC the movie so you can watch it. - Your PC now has the movie in memory. - You extract the movie from your PC's memory and you can now watch it forever without Netflix's permission. What the "trusted" in Trusted Platform Module means is that with TPM they can trust your PC to not let you do that. |
Chrome OS really got this one right. You can disable all the security, but there is hardware that tells you that happened. It can also tell your employer so you don't download their IP to a laptop running malware. That's all it's ever been used for; no matter how much people try to make DRM a thing, it's never once worked. Every Netflix-exclusive show is easily downloadable on Usenet.