BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop

Post by H8crilA » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 9:02 AM UTC

zelly wrote: post #186

0kl wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better opsec would have saved him some grief as well. Before even touching on his habitual use of coffee shops near his residence to run the Silk Road... > The connection was made by linking the username "altoid", used during Silk Road's early days to announce the website, and a forum post in which Ulbricht, posting under the nickname "altoid", asked for programming help and gave his email address, which contained hi…

He would still have gone to prison no matter what (the government can make up evidence), but they may not have been able to seize his Bitcoin without stealing his laptop.

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 9:12 AM UTC

tropo wrote: post #196

closeparen wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'll be a lonely hill to die on. We in California collectively decided that theft under $950 is not a big deal and should be fought less vigorously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47

That was a mistake. Criminals now very purposely run off with just shy of $950. Theft is way up in California. Meanwhile, in Texas you'd just shoot the laptop thief, either as soon as aware of the imminent theft or as the thief flees. It's fully supported by the law: https://lawofselfdefense.com/statute/texas-sec-9-42-deadly-f... Law enforcement in many communities would congratulate you for a job well done.

Post by rdc12 » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 9:25 AM UTC

andrey_utkin wrote: post #160

daveidol wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the laptop is still online / comes back online to receive the wipe command...

... and you are conscious and have your hands free :)

Post by londons_explore » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #169

jbarberu wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your attack vector is adversaries ready to deep freeze your laptop, perhaps you should do your computing in a more secure location :)

A secure location is an ICBMable location. (Not that anyone realistically has this problem, but “so safe that Bin Laden would still be alive” feels like the right level of overengineering when it comes to OPSEC.)

Post by londons_explore » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 9:41 AM UTC

nwallin wrote: post #195

wongarsu wrote: post #35

Earlier 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 would expect the unmount of an encrypted filesystem to secure delete the encryption key from memory. My understanding of the memory freezing attacks is that you don't unmount it, you just kill the power by removing the battery. With this method, you would still be able to freeze the RAM, reboot the computer, dump the RAM, and disassemble the kernel memory, and discover where the disk encryption key was stored: in t…