Warning: ubuntu tpm recovery key cannot unlock disk outside of boot - eviltoast

Hi everybody, bit of a warning here: The recovery key generated during the installation of Ubuntu 23.10 (if you select tpm-backed fde) cannot be used to unlock the disk outside of boot, as in any ‘cryptsetup’ command and so on will not accept the recovery key. unlocking when accessed from different system does not work etc.

You can use it to unlock the disk while booting if your tpm somehow fails, but ONLY in that specific situation.

I kind of purposefully broke my tpm keys to see if it could be restored with 23.10 and ended up having to reinstal, as I ended up having to enter the recovery key at boot every time and no way of adding additional unlock options to the volume, as cryptsetup would not accept the recovery key as passphrase.

This bug could be very bad for new users.

See this bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-desktop-installer/+bug/2039741

    • MAFoElffen@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 year ago

      Success! I have a working key file…

      root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu/Downloads# cryptsetup -v luksOpen /dev/sda3 luks-01 --key-file ./key-file.key
No usable token is available.
Warning: keyslot operation could fail as it requires more than available memory.
Key slot 1 unlocked.
Command successful.
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu/Downloads# cryptsetup -v luksOpen /dev/sda4 luks-02 --key-file ./key-file.key
No usable token is available.
Warning: keyslot operation could fail as it requires more than available memory.
Key slot 1 unlocked.
Command successful.

      Success on the first volume, which I picked as first because it was only 53M in size. Mounted it to /mnt… And guess what I found inside it?

      root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu/Downloads# ls -l /mnt/device/private-keys-v1/
total 4
-rw------- 1 root root 2459 Oct 18 18:29 O8CbAEpnfm7jGKkMqnokmdMBlE1oV6Xma_bUNudlshDYPxE4aJNhbhiGnF360Ze4

      That is a key, but not connected to either LUKS container there… I dumped the headers of both LUKS. There are 2 key-slots, and the key translated from the recovery key is in slot one of both containers, The second key-slot’s key must be the TPM’s key, which is unknown if that is stored anywhere except the TPM…

      But is shouldn’t matter now… Because that key-file did work to add a new passphrase to both LUKS containers.

      Thank you @Skull giver.