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How Chrome OS, Termux, YubiKey and Duo Mobile make for great usable security

blog.lessonslearned.org

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Re: How Chrome OS, Termux, YubiKey and Duo Mobile make for great usable security

#2
I tried using a Chromebook as a dev machine several years ago - before Android apps. The chroot situation worked well enough, but the dev-mode boot was a deal-breaker.

Back then, if a Chromebook's local storage filled up, it would factory-reset itself. Is this still the case? This is one big thing keeping me from trying this again (which I'm very tempted to do so after reading this article). Investing in setting up a dev environment like this is fun, but only the first time around...

Re: How Chrome OS, Termux, YubiKey and Duo Mobile make for great usable security

#4
post #3

I love my C201, also not very expensive. I opted for the 4Gb version. My first setup was chromeos + crouton then I moved to linux on a sd card. I noticed I never boot into chromeos anymore so I got rid of it.

I have a C201 too...I reflashed the bootloader with libreboot and installed arch linux on it. It it actually quite snappy, and works fine for development!

Re: How Chrome OS, Termux, YubiKey and Duo Mobile make for great usable security

#7
post #2

I tried using a Chromebook as a dev machine several years ago - before Android apps. The chroot situation worked well enough, but the dev-mode boot was a deal-breaker. Back then, if a Chromebook's local storage filled up, it would factory-reset itself. Is this still the case? This is one big thing keeping me from trying this again (which I'm very tempted to do so after reading this article). Investing in setting up a…

I think the author was arguing that the install was cloud-backed in such a way that you could simply factory-reset it and restore it, especially before and after travel through oppressive security inspections. I'm not sure it's completely described though.

Re: How Chrome OS, Termux, YubiKey and Duo Mobile make for great usable security

#8
post #3

I love my C201, also not very expensive. I opted for the 4Gb version. My first setup was chromeos + crouton then I moved to linux on a sd card. I noticed I never boot into chromeos anymore so I got rid of it.

I have a C201 too...I reflashed the bootloader with libreboot and installed arch linux on it. It it actually quite snappy, and works fine for development!

I also run arch linux. I tried setting up debian recently, works good too. Do you run 3.14 kernel (linux-veyron) or the mainline (linux-armv7)?

Re: How Chrome OS, Termux, YubiKey and Duo Mobile make for great usable security

#9

I'm a bit confused (did skim article only). Is this running ChromeOS or Linux? Can I get steam games like stardew valley to run on it?

ChromeOS, Termux, and probably not. You might be able to run some Android games though.

Re: How Chrome OS, Termux, YubiKey and Duo Mobile make for great usable security

#10
This blog post details using a chromebook as a temporary device, such that you can travel with a blank machine, and provision at your destination with the data and apps you may need:

> It's pretty neat to consider the possibility of pre-travel "power washing" (resetting everything clean to factory settings) on an inexpensive Chromebook and later securely restore over the air once at my destination. ... the engineering challenge here was to find something powerful enough to comfortably use exclusively for several days of coding, writing, and presenting, but also cheap enough that should it get lost/stolen/damaged, I wouldn't lose too much sleep. ... I could treat it as a burner and move on.

Edit; I've been using a de-chromed chromebook for over a year as my primary dev machine and really like it. I developed and launched one side project with it. The model I have (Acer C720) is a dual core Centrino, 2GB of ram, and I upgraded the m2 sata to 120GB. For Python/PHP/Ruby, it's great. I would not do Java development on this set up though. Java IDEs eat battery life and I imagine jvm startup time is a burden on this, although I haven't even installed Java to find out.

Edit 2: to clarify, this is not about removing chromeos, but to use chromeos for it's security features. The article goes over using Termux to get a basic development/work environment setup on chromeos. Plus a lot other helpful tips.

I offered my experience de-chroming as an example, I really like the platform. Apologies if that was confusing.

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