19 Oct
2025
19 Oct
'25
8:29 a.m.
On Fri, Oct 17, 2025 at 12:21:11PM -0400, cz via cctalk wrote:
Interesting. Bitlocker keys work fine on the X61, they
are stored in the TPM
and are pretty secure.
Depends. As long as your threat model does not include "technically
competent attacker has 20min of undisturbed time alone with the machine",
you are fine. It has been demonstrated years ago that by sniffing the
traffic to/from the TPM (by attaching probes) one can easily extract
the FDE keys and successfully mount the disk. More time if they want
to grab a full disk image.
Of course this threat requires:
- someone sufficiently interested in the contents of your laptop
- said someone being able the acquire the services of aforementioned
"competent attacker"
- said someone also preferring to be sneaky about it instead of going
for "rubber hose cryptanalysis"
So for most people, that tends not to be something they need to be worried
about.
I really need to try this. And yes, there are a
billion reasons to dunk on
Windows, but the fact that the OS runs on a 19 year old laptop is still not
NetBSD runs very well on a 19y old Sun Fire V100 ;-)
too bad. My AT&T7300 can't match this, nor can
any of the Apple products
(well you can hack the installer for Intel core duo stuff but it's not
really supported and Apple is seriously turning perfectly good older
hardware into trash)
There are multiple reasons why one sees Thinkpad laptops among geeks.
Decent documentation and long service life (my 14y old x220 still
works fine, though I missed the 1080 panel upgrade) are definitely
among them.
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison