tpmadm(1M) (man pages section 1M: System Administration Commands)

man pages section 1M: System Administration Commands

tpmadm(1M)

Name

tpmadm– administer Trusted Platform Module

Synopsis

tpmadm status

tpmadm init

tpmadm clear [owner | lock]

tpmadm auth

tpmadm keyinfo [uuid]

tpmadm deletekey uuid

Description

A Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a hardware component that provides for protected key storage and reliable measurements of software used to boot the operating system. The tpmadm utility is used to initialize and administer the TPM so that it can be used by the operating system and other programs.

The TPM subsystem can store and manage an unlimited number of keys for use by the operating system and by users. Each key is identified by a Universally Unique Identifier, or UUID.

Although the TPM can hold only a limited number of keys at any given time, the supporting software automatically loads and unloads keys as needed. When a key is stored outside the TPM, it is always encrypted or “wrapped” by its parent key so that the key is never exposed in readable form outside the TPM.

Before the TPM can be used, it must be initialized by the platform owner. This process involves setting an owner password which is used to authorize privileged operations.

Although the TPM owner is similar to a traditional superuser, there are two important differences. First, process privilege is irrelevant for access to TPM functions. All privileged operations require knowledge of the owner password, regardless of the privilege level of the calling process. Second, the TPM owner is not able to override access controls for data protected by TPM keys. The owner can effectively destroy data by re-initializing the TPM, but he cannot access data that has been encrypted using TPM keys owned by other users.

Sub-commands

The following subcommands are used in the form:

# tpamadm <subcommand> [operand]

status: Report status information about the TPM. Output includes basic information about whether ownership of the TPM has been established, current PCR contents, and the usage of TPM resources such as communication sessions and loaded keys.
init: Initialize the TPM for use. This involves taking ownership of the TPM by setting the owner authorization password. Taking ownership of the TPM creates a new storage root key, which is the ancestor of all keys created by this TPM. Once this command is issued, the TPM must be reset using BIOS operations before it can be re-initialized.
auth: Change the owner authorization password for the TPM.
clear lock: Clear the count of failed authentication attempts. After a number of failed authentication attempts, the TPM responds more slowly to subsequent attempts, in an effort to thwart attempts to find the owner password by exhaustive search. This command, which requires the correct owner password, resets the count of failed attempts.
clear owner: Deactivate the TPM and return it to an unowned state. This operation, which requires the current TPM owner password, invalidates all keys and data tied to the TPM. Before the TPM can be used again, the system must be restarted, the TPM must be reactivated from the BIOS or ILOM pre-boot environment, and the TPM must be re-initialized using the tpmadm init command.
keyinfo [uuid]: Report information about keys stored in the TPM subsystem. Without additional arguments, this subcommand produces a brief listing of all keys. If the UUID of an individual key is specified, detailed information about that key is displayed.
deletekey uuid: Delete the key with the specified UUID from the TPM subsystem's persistent storage.

Exit Status

After completing the requested operation, tpmadm exits with one of the following status values.

0: Successful termination.
1: Failure. The requested operation could not be completed.
2: Usage error. The tpmadm command was invoked with invalid arguments.

Attributes

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE	ATTRIBUTE VALUE
Availability	SUNWcsu
Interface Stability	Committed

Notes

tpmadm communicates with the TPM device through the tcsd service. tcsd must be running before using the tpmadm command. If tcsd is not running, tpmadm will generate the following error:

Connect context: Communication failure (0x3011)

See tcsd(8) for more details.

SunOS 5.11 Last Revised 8 Oct 2009