Thank you for that sombering reminder of why I rarely post here anymore. > If you would find this more exciting, there's no shortage of fiction already available on similar subjects. Any recommendations?
I was trying not to be overly rude, but your post read like "this journalism would be better if it had more wild speculation rather than reporting proven facts."
Nah, just a failed attempt at humor.
I mean, trying to impersonate TSB as a way to attract attention from intelligence agencies is insane on the face of it.
The article was great; no qualms with it whatsoever.
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…
> If you care about this, then put the laptop in a tamper-evident bag. How does this procedure work for multiday evil maid situations? The first day while you're out the maid replaces your collection of plastic disposable tamper-evident bags with faulty ones that open with a particular chemical but otherwise look identical. The second day the maid tampers with your laptop and you don't notice. Do you just have to tak…
So part of the point of tamper evident seals is that they are difficult to duplicate. The bags themselves should be readily verifiable, eg with a serial number for basic verification at least. The sort of seals used for nuclear treaty enforcement actually most commonly use little fibers that are randomly mixed in with plastic and their pattern is photographed, making them extremely difficult to duplicate.
That depends where in the design, manufacture, and provisioning stage this occurs, and by whom. It's quite possible Micah was looking at the wrong signifiers. (Difficult to prove, natch, but possible.)
Sure, it's possible. We know that the NSA intercepts machines for modification. And it's possible that hardware is generally backdoored. Maybe even by Chinese manufacturers. But what can one do, if everything is pwned? It's not practical to build machines from transistors etc. There are dreams of open-source hardware. But how could that even be done securely? The NSA can plant agents anywhere, in theory.
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 mean…
Should I experience an untimely demise know that it was not self-destruction, I am a martyr.
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.
Get some physical tamper detection on opening the case. Something like the old spy trick of 'leaving a hear on the door-handle'.
There are some nice tips here on spray glitter on a seal and nail-polishing it, then taking a photo. That way, anyone that breaks the seal has to reproduce the same glitter pattern.
I think you have got a bit confused here. For example Fermat's Last Theorem is effectively "a negative": "no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2"
That phrase applies basically everywhere else except math. It's only possible to prove a negative in mathematics because it's a fully logical system. On a side note Fermat's Last Theorem isn't a good counterexample because it hasn't been proven yet either.
If you really want to get down to it, math doesn't work either. Godel's second incompleteness theorem means we can never be sure whether any mathematical system is 'fully logical'.
I'm calling this a bad test in general. Let's be honest here. None of the more cutting edge attacks are going to be risked by attacking. as hard a target as this guy. The level of sophistication of attack the author is starting to reach is going to be reserved for state-level persons-of-interest. Espionage is a game of judging capabilities, and cracking some security researcher's laptop telegraphs to the rest of the…
I’d say it’s a bad test not because of how hard a target he is, but because he’s not an attractive enough target. What would be the payoff?
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…
Why not place a hidden battery powered camera pointed at your laptop and secretly record what goes on in the room when you're away?