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It could be burned into the CPU die by blowing fuses, or stored in a tiny bit of on-die flash, or stored encrypted in SPI flash, encrypted with a factory secret key burned into the CPU at manufacture.

But more generally, you don’t need a long term key to prevent sniffing attacks like this; Diffie-Hellman is a thing. Doing an unauthenticated DH would make this attack harder and slower (active MitM probably requires removing the TPM chip from the board) but would not prevent it.



Maybe it would be more practical MITMing near the CPU. Some plastic "extender" routing the relevant pins through an external device but still allowing for cooling?

But could the communication be authenticated? Like in CPU having a public cert, self signed. TPM then can authenticate the CPU that generates the key and later sends it only over an authenticated TLS session to the same CPU.




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