Corporate interests HATE general purpose computing, and the freedom to run what you want. With that freedom, you can hurt their interests by blocking ads, stripping out spyware, or avoiding giving up your privacy, and they can't let you have that.
It's a death by thousand cuts that's finally starting to come together:
- Remote attestation like Play "integrity"
- Hardware backed DRM like Widevine
- No full access to filesystem on Android, and no access to filesystem at all on iOS
- No ability to run your own programs at all on iOS without Apple's permission.
- "Secure" boot on Android and iOS that do not allow running your own software
Ever wondered why Windows 11 have a TPM requirement? No, it's not just planned obsolescence.
If they get their way, user-owned computers running free software will never be usable again, and we'll lose the final escape hatch slowing down the enshittification of computers. The only hope we have is that they turn up the temperature a little too quickly that normies would catch on before it gets far enough.
Windows 11 has tpm required to enforce full disk encryption that is pinned to a given machine. Linux would do well to do the same thing. It's possible but almost no one does it.
This sounds like a great way to lose data when the machine dies unexpectedly.
Linux should replicate Microsoft's feature where they back up your "full disk encryption" keys to your cloud account, completely unencrypted, and share them with the cops.
You can print recovery codes. Just chuck them in your safe.
Cryptography is only safe against someone who doesn't come and beat the password out of you if they want it. In my case, only my laptop is encrypted so if I lose it when I'm out it's useless.
What is the benefit of having full disk encryption pinned to a machine?
The benefit is to not type encryption password on every boot. TPM stores the encryption key and Secure Boot ensures that the system is not tampered.
That said, I think that it's better to use alternative approach. Use unencrypted signed system partition which presents login screen. After user typed their username and password, only user home gets decrypted. This scheme does not require TPM and only uses secure boot to ensure that system partition has not been altered. I think that macOS uses similar approach.
Kinda like how I have it set up in linux except the system partition is the uki and the user password is LUKS2 passphrase
Anti theft