If you're using a macbook, isn't "Find my mac" enough to erase remotely?, I understand this is a faster disabling mechanism but also a bit inconvenient. I wish there was something even easier, like a tiny usb drive with a remote control
BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop
141–150 of 272 posts
Re: BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are doing proper OpSec, you would have whole disk encryption anyway, in which case destroying the computer is largely unnecessary, I think. That said, the caveat of XKCD 538 ( https://www.xkcd.com/538/ ) still applies.
Are there any known cases of western police forces beating people with wrenches until they gave up passwords?
Re: BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. My point is he had full disk encryption and password at boot and it didn’t stop the govt from accessing his data.
It was logged in and running when they snatched it. Hence why a breakaway mag connector and dead-man shutdown script might have been helpful.
Re: BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whenever I read stuff like this I am forced to wonder just what the fuck people are doing that they feel such a pressing need to hide their data from law enforcement. I mean, I have plenty of things to hide just like any other reasonably interesting person, but none of it is outright criminal.
They could be organizing protests in Hong Kong. Or be a union organizer in South Africa.
Re: BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop
#145Ross Ulbricht had his laptop snatched by an undercover FBI agent while he was using it. This kill cord might have saved him some grief.
Better, perhaps, would be to trigger wiping the LUKS header and deleting the boot partition.
Re: BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory an adversary could deep-freeze the computer the moment the kill cord activates. Sufficiently cold RAM doesn't loose data immediately when it loses power, allowing the adversary to make a copy and read the decryption keys from RAM. Though if this is part of your threat model you should be much more concerned about a thousand more mundane problems, like adversaries reconstructing keystrokes from keyboard vibr…
I'd like to see a post demonstrating this attack.
For using reflections, there's this paper implementing reading screen content from various things like reading glasses, a can of coke or even the user's eye (including a discussion of limitations): http://gauss.ececs.uc.edu/Courses/c6055/extra/reflections.pd...
Right now I can't find something on reading keyboard vibrations with lasers, but here's one doing it acoustically and one doing it via acclerometer of a phone on the table:
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/23322/keyboard-...
https://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/papers/general/traynor-cc...
Re: BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop
#147Re: BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised there isn't a "ready to go" solution with a duress passphrase that boots a plausible, but "clean" system.
you'll still have to explain why there is a huge blob of seemingly random data on your hard drive if someone looks close enough.
Re: BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can do whatever you want it to do. The examples in the article were: • whenever any USB drive is removed, trigger xscreensaver to lock the screen: > ACTION=="remove", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", RUN+="DISPLAY=:0 xscreensaver-command -lock" • whenever a specific USB drive is removed, shut down the computer: > ACTION=="remove", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{ID_MODEL}=="Micromax_A74", RUN+="shutdown -h now"
Nitpick, it can do whatever you want it to do that’s possible in software. You’ll be disappointed if you want to have it drill a hole in your hard drive ;)
Re: BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are doing proper OpSec, you would have whole disk encryption anyway, in which case destroying the computer is largely unnecessary, I think. That said, the caveat of XKCD 538 ( https://www.xkcd.com/538/ ) still applies.
In theory an adversary could deep-freeze the computer the moment the kill cord activates. Sufficiently cold RAM doesn't loose data immediately when it loses power, allowing the adversary to make a copy and read the decryption keys from RAM. Though if this is part of your threat model you should be much more concerned about a thousand more mundane problems, like adversaries reconstructing keystrokes from keyboard vibr…