This is wildly shortsighted view of mathematics. Historically many of the subfields of math which are presently most valuable were considered useless for decades or centuries. Number theory, non-Euclidean geometry, group theory, and Boolean algebra, to name a few.
This is false dichotomy. Many mathematical achievements were produced while looking at practical problems: Fourier is a good one. For every mathematician that accidentally made a practical contribution, there are many more that produced nothing of value, and would have with a better tuned reward function.
I guess this AI wave will divide the population more between people that think that only economic value exists, and people that dont.
Thats one of the timeless human debates.
We are now living in the perfect combo of low morality and general human automation. So i expect the next few decades dominated by people who think (and have a "proof") that doing something without an expected economic gain is useless.
I recommend trying out PulseEffects, my understanding is that EasyEffects is the same project they just did a rename of it. You might be stuck on an older version or something not exactly sure.
I don't know exactly how long loading value from a TPM takes, but my gut says it would be much too long to do it on task switch. Almost certainly fine for waking up from suspend though. Also the problem that physical TPMs communicate with the CPU over plaintext and TPMs in general, including fTPMs, have had notable vulnerabilities.
The man page ld.so has ENVIRONMENT section that looks pretty good.
Otherwise one of the most reliable options is to simply grep the source code for calls to getenv, I would not be that surprised if their are some extra ones that are undocumented.
Please just buy a proper differential probe for stuff like this, you definitely don't need the R&SRT-ZHD mentioned in the article. Otherwise loved the article btw.
Their have been many vulnerabilities in TrustZone implementations and both Google and Apple now use separate secure element chips. In Apple's case they put the secure element as part of their main SoC, but on devices where that wasn't designed in house like Intel they had the T2 Security Chip. On all Pixel devices I'm pretty sure the Titan has been a separate chip (at least since they started including it at all).
So yes incorporating a separate secure element\TPM chip into a design is probably more secure, but ultimately the right call will always depend on your threat model.
Here's an excerpt about the anti-rollback feature from Nvidia's docs on how the Tegra X1 SoC in the switch 1 boots [0] (called Tegra210 in the document)
> By default, the boot ROM will only consider bootloader entries with a version field that matches the version field of the first entry, and will stop iterating through the entries is a mismatch is found. The intent is to ensure that if some subset of the bootloader entries are upgraded, and hence the version field of their entries is modified, then the boot ROM will only boot the most recent version of the bootloader. This prevents an accidental rollback to an earlier version of the bootloader in the face of boot memory read errors, corruption, or tampering. Observe that this relies on upgraded bootloader entries being placed contiguously at the start of the array.
It isn't that wild; the typical name for it is anti-rollback, and you probably have at least one device that implements it. Most Android devices have anti-rollback efuses to prevent installing older versions of the bootchain\bootloader; they might still allow you to downgrade the OS (depends on the vendor, if memory serves). Instead of using efuse counters, anti-rollback counters can also be implemented by Replay Protected Memory Block (RPMB), which is implemented by many flash storage (eMMC often supports RPMB, but other storage types can as well). It is possible to implement anti-rollback mechanisms on x86_64 by utilizing a TPM [0], but as far as I know, only Chrome OS does this.
