A deep dive into hardware monotonic counters, NVRAM rate limiting, and defensive state machines in post-quantum TPMs.
In a rollback attack, an adversary forces a system to boot an older, historically legitimate version of software that contains known, unpatched security vulnerabilities. Once the older vulnerable software is running, the adversary exploits it to extract sensitive credentials.
TPMVault implements dedicated non-volatile monotonic counters that can only be incremented, never decremented. Firmware update routines increment the hardware counter; during measured boot, the TPM verifies that the bootloader version matches or exceeds the counter state before unsealing critical secrets.
Analyzing flash memory endurance limitations: engineering smart caching and non-volatile wear-leveling algorithms to ensure monotonic counters support millions of state updates across decades of operational life.