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With the advent of Windows 11 I'm kind of curious about the nature of Intel's PTT (Platform Trust Technology). I have a 7700K and it supports PTT -- I've enabled it and have confirmed it works, but I'm curious about the implications of using it. I have a few related questions.

  • Where is the TPM data stored?
  • Is it on my motherboard as part of the chipset, or is it part of the CPU core itself?
  • If I change my CPU core will that corrupt or reset my TPM?
  • Are there any other hardware configuration changes that can effect the integrity of the TPM data?

I like to tweak and modify my PC hardware from time to time, I'd like to avoid any unforeseen consequences of my tinkering.

Giacomo1968
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Robert Hurst
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2 Answers2

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Its part of your CPU - or more specifically part of the management engine on your south-bridge. On Kaby lake - its currently part of your processor. Changing your processor essentially is the same as swapping out a hardware TPM - I wouldn't call it 'corruption', in the sense that nothing happened to your TPM data... its just in another castle.

As such, in essence changing your TPM would mean that anything that relies on it might fail - it might store cryptographic keys for example.

"What" might be affected by a change of processor is an interesting question. There's a list of things that windows uses the TPM for Bitlocker might be a potentially obvious issue, since some bitlocker setups rely on the TPM and you would likely want to disable bitlocker before changing.

Likewise, any cryptographic keys that are stored using the TPM might be invalid - and you may need to re-set up any credentials that rely on it.

Journeyman Geek
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I have been researching this myself over the past couple days. PTT is Intel's name for fTPM. While the functionality is part of the CPU your motherboard needs to have the ability to enable it. Early reporting indicated that Windows 11 may have a requirement for 8th gen Core I processors but I believe that is just as far back as anyone is going to bother to go back and verify. The impact of changing a TPM on a system will be dependent on what was implemented using the TPM. If you did not use it for anything turning it off should not have any impacted on your system, on the other hand if you enabled BitLocker and then remove your TPM chances are all your data that was encrypted will be basically lost. Given that PTT is a BIOS switch on supported systems you could check functionality by enabling and disabling after implementing security features which utilize PTT.

ASBoxxer
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