A Bad Dream: Subverting Trusted Platform Module While You Are Sleeping

This paper reports two sorts of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) attacks regarding power management. The attacks allow an adversary to reset and forge platform configuration registers which are designed to securely hold measurements of software that are used for bootstrapping a computer. One attack is exploiting a design flaw in the TPM 2.0 specification for the static root of trust for measurement (SRTM). The other attack is exploiting an implementation flaw in tboot, the most popular measured launched environment used with Intel's Trusted Execution Technology. Considering TPM-based platform integrity protection is widely used, the attacks may affect a large number of devices. We demonstrate the attacks with commodity hardware. The SRTM attack is significant because its countermeasure requires hardwarespecific firmware patches that could take a long time to be applied.