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I don't know how the security architecture works in detail, but that really seems like the sort of thing a modified BIOS could work around with a strategic byte write to a known memory address. It's ~impossible to defend yourself against an attacker running on a higher ring than you.
You are, in principle, correct but that's exactly what dedicated cryptography hardware like a TPM is there to resolve. The BIOS stuffs some values not known ahead of time but measured/detected during the boot process (like a hash of the values in a bunch of different registers at point D during an ABCDEFG register sequence) into the hardware gizmo. Then the OS polls the gizmo for its current value and tries to decrypt its main boot volume using that as the key - wrong value, fail to boot. A compromised BIOS will now get different results from the measurements/hashses and can't reproduce that same state. If it had full control over the TPM, it could, but it doesn't - it does not respect ring 0. To be clear, there is still a way to beat this - you just have to monitor the values sent to the gizmo and then replay them in order, rather than trying to do the measurements yourself, but you can't accomplish that without physical access to the internals of the machine and some kind of sensor/probe to watch whichever bus the traffic goes over. You can also try to crack open the gizmo and read back its state, but that's also access-to-internals level.
Ah, that's fair. So for instance the TPM could detect a patched bios by polling the actual eeprom for a checksum? Or just signature check the whole thing. It wouldn't even have to use the BIOS to talk to the hardware in the first place. The BIOS just has to go "okay, you have the hardware, I won't touch the bus for the next x ms."
I guess that's pretty convincing in theory. (Do I trust that it's actually working like that? Is it even on?)
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