Can a $10 Raspberry Pi break your PC’s disk encryption? It’s complicated.

A security researcher demonstrated an exploit that could break Microsoft 's BitLocker encryption in " less than 50 seconds " The exploit works by using the Pi to monitor communication between an external TPM chip and the rest of the laptop.

This is not a new exploit, and StackSmashing has repeatedly said as much.

Many modern systems use firmware TPM modules, or fTPMs, that are built directly into most processors.

StackSmashing posted photos of a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11 with a hardware TPM and all the pins someone would need to try to nab the encryption key.

Laptops made before 2015 or 2016 are all virtually guaranteed to be using hardware tPMs.

Some security researchers have been able to defeat the fTPMs in some of AMD 's processors with " 23 hours of physical access to the target device".