Active and Passive Attacks against TPM 2.0-based Full Disk Encryption

Sven Freud; Lennart Hein; Dominik Klein

Paper 2026/2579

Active and Passive Attacks against TPM 2.0-based Full Disk Encryption

Sven Freud, Federal Office for Information Security

Lennart Hein, Federal Office for Information Security

Dominik Klein

, Federal Office for Information Security

Abstract

Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0-based full-disk encryption (FDE) has gained renewed importance with the rise of bring-your-own-device environments. Aside from Windows Bitlocker, which uses the TPM since the days of Windows Vista, FDE has also been recently adopted by several Linux distributions. We revisit tamper attacks against TPM 2.0-based FDE systems and analyze the security of current Windows and Linux implementations. We examine TPM 2.0 sealing mechanisms and demonstrate passive and active attacks against systems using discrete TPMs (dTPMs) connected via SPI, using a mini PC and a notebook platform as case studies. While dTPMs are highly tamper-resistant, they remain vulnerable to attacks on the communication bus. We further show that active attacks are not limited to dTPM bus interception but can also affect firmware TPMs (fTPMs). Specifically, we present a prototype attack in a virtualized QEMU environment targeting UEFI firmware rather than bus communication, impacting both Windows and modern Linux systems. These attacks enable us to break not only BitLocker-based full-disk encryption on Windows, but also all current Linux implementations, including those that utilize parameter encryption to secure the bus communication. Our findings expose weaknesses in current TPM 2.0 FDE implementations and motivate stronger specification-level protections.

Note: This is an extended version of the paper presented at the CSR HACS, Lisbon, 2026-08-05

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Attacks and cryptanalysis
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Major revision. IEEE-CSR Conference HACS
Keywords: TPM trusted computing SPI LPC BitLocker LUKS Full Disk Encryption
Contact author(s): sven freud @ bsi bund de
lennart hein @ bsi bund de
dominik klein @ bsi bund de
History: 2026-10-24: approved; 2026-10-21: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2026/2579
License: CC BY-NC-ND

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/2579,
      author = {Sven Freud and Lennart Hein and Dominik Klein},
      title = {Active and Passive Attacks against {TPM} 2.0-based Full Disk Encryption},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/2579},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/2579}
}