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It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked

theintercept.com

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Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked

#71

Post by GyYZTfWBfQw »

discordianfish wrote: post #60

My Linux laptop is fully encrypted and I’ve signed and enrolled my own secure boot keys. Just following best practices and now wondering where this leaves me vulnerable. I think it should prevent tampering with the bootloader but not sure about hdd/net Firmware etc.

Nice, you just lost plausible deniability. The Government can come and take your shit, and if you don't decrypt it for them, you will be thrown to prison for obstruction of justice. Following the best practices also include not disclosing the very fact your hard drive is fully encrypted.

Obligatory xkcd: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png

Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked

#72

Post by ComodoHacker »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #68
ComodoHacker wrote: post #66

Hardware tampering is't performed on a mass scale. It's always a targeted attack. What the author actually forgot to do was to add some honey into the honeypot. I.e. become an attractive target.

He's a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a position also held by Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg. Additionally, he has helped develop SecureDrop and various other tools to enable the anonymous spread of information. Finally, he works for The Intercept, an organization that has a history of receiving leaked information. Seems like a plausible target to me.

I didn't know that, thank you.

Nevertheless, as his experiment have shown, that was not enough.

Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked

#73

Post by benevol »

tripletao wrote: post #7

If you care about this, then put the laptop in a tamper-evident bag. Those are necessarily imperfect too; but there's work making tamper-evident seals to resist up to state-level attacks, since that's relevant in stuff like enforcement of nuclear weapons treaties. That succeeds to the extent that you can find a physical effect that's easy to create and measure, but hard to recreate deterministically. (In concept, dum…

> put the laptop in a tamper-evident bag

Do you have URLs to products that are big enough for say 17'' laptops?

Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked

#75

Post by tomcooks »

mrschwabe wrote: post #52
mirimir wrote: post #12

The best defense is being someone too uninteresting to bother. Once you're interesting so some resourceful adversary, it's very hard to avoid devices being hacked, and virtually impossible to determine if they've been hacked.

Or not be a coward and be interesting, speak up, and not back down. If more of us do that than not then they will at least have a very difficult time in tracking us all.

While I agree with the meaning behind your post, I think that this attitude leads to self destruction in the current timeline.

A much smarter approach in my opinion is to live on two separate layers: a secure private underground and an uninteresting public surface.

This not only keeps the enemy content, it also keeps tracking low; any open confrontation will necessarily lead to harsher measures, which ultimately means violence.

If samizdat worked in the URSS it can work nowadays too.

Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked

#76

Post by garaetjjte »

gerdesj wrote: post #21
cameldrv wrote: post #16

If you're a target of a major intelligence agency, I think that you have to assume that all of your computers are irretrievably compromised. From Vault 7, we know that the CIA has long developed implants to infect both the EFI and hard drive firmware that load before any potential code that could detect them. These could be made arbitrarily hard to detect without physically opening the computer and dumping these flas…

I think you are absolutely correct with your assessment. I recall Alan Cox (welsh bloke, big beard, Linux kernel hacker (well: simply hacker in general will do)) posting on G+ about someone booting enough Linux on a hard disc to get a prompt. No not the disc itself, off the firmware on the controller. You may also like to consider that nearly all modern server systems have an iLO/iDRAC or whatever that can do all sor…

http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1

Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked

#78

Post by VikingCoder »

nautilus12 wrote: post #77

So guys laptop doesnt get hacked and he writes a story about how it could have been hacked but probbably wasnt. Thats some CNN level stuff right there

It's an article attempting to discuss how you would tell if your laptop had been hacked.

If you find some media that rises to this level, please let me know about it, because I thought it was excellent.

Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked

#79

Post by blueprint »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #68
ComodoHacker wrote: post #66

Hardware tampering is't performed on a mass scale. It's always a targeted attack. What the author actually forgot to do was to add some honey into the honeypot. I.e. become an attractive target.

He's a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a position also held by Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg. Additionally, he has helped develop SecureDrop and various other tools to enable the anonymous spread of information. Finally, he works for The Intercept, an organization that has a history of receiving leaked information. Seems like a plausible target to me.

But was there any specific thing during the course of his trial run that would have enticed an attacker? And given the fact that a supposed attacker would ostensibly be able to detect the existence of honey before the attack, would they not also be able to detect the absence of it? (And perhaps its simultaneous absence during the course of the trial)

Seems like an experimental bias to me

Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked

#80

Post by jaclaz »

Thesis: it is possible that someone may access your laptop without you knowing if you leave it unattended.

Experiment: after having gone through a number of - some meaningless[1] - attempts to be able to proof that this happened, there was no evidence it happened.

Doubt: did it happen nonetheless without leaving any trace ot it din't actually happened at all?

Bonus: the experimenter learned that NVRAM exists in the stupid UEFI firmware

Conclusion: None worth mentioning, but be very aware of what the terrible evil maids can do, and do use the recommended Android app to defend against them.

[1] Hashing a whole hard disk is only a "positive" proof, if the hashes correspond nothing changed, but it is very possible that the hashes change because of any filesystem or disk issue if the system is used, so the method is pointless in the real world, where people bring with them a laptop in order to use it.

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