PAM Duress – Alternate passwords for panic situations
1–10 of 358 posts
Re: PAM Duress – Alternate passwords for panic situations
#2If I understand correctly, this appears to be Linux only?
Re: PAM Duress – Alternate passwords for panic situations
#3If I understand correctly, this appears to be Linux only?
It's based on PAM (pluggable authentication module) which should exist on MacOS and BSDs as well.
Re: PAM Duress – Alternate passwords for panic situations
#4I mean, that's pretty cool, but who enables password logins for SSH anymore? If I'm an attacker, I'm going to wonder why my target of duress is giving me a password and not a private key; most likely if I have access to my target of duress, then I have access to some kind of client / endpoint that my target uses to connect to the network, and that client will have the SSH private keys likely already loaded into ssh-agent.
Maybe a more modern concept would be to both a) have a duress private key, that triggers duress scripts in the same way, b) an implementation of ssh-agent that adds the duress private key when a duress password is entered?
Re: PAM Duress – Alternate passwords for panic situations
#5I mean, that's pretty cool, but who enables password logins for SSH anymore? If I'm an attacker, I'm going to wonder why my target of duress is giving me a password and not a private key; most likely if I have access to my target of duress, then I have access to some kind of client / endpoint that my target uses to connect to the network, and that client will have the SSH private keys likely already loaded into ssh-a…
I don't think this is specific to SSH.
You could just as easily use this on your client machine and have it delete your private keys if you try to login with the duress password.
Re: PAM Duress – Alternate passwords for panic situations
#6I mean, that's pretty cool, but who enables password logins for SSH anymore? If I'm an attacker, I'm going to wonder why my target of duress is giving me a password and not a private key; most likely if I have access to my target of duress, then I have access to some kind of client / endpoint that my target uses to connect to the network, and that client will have the SSH private keys likely already loaded into ssh-a…
Pam is for more than just ssh. This could wipe data on a Linux machine for a local login, gdm, sudo, and so on.
Re: PAM Duress – Alternate passwords for panic situations
#7It's a very cool idea, but I think it would be most useful if applied to things like phones. I suspect most people pressed for passwords, are using a GUI system.
Re: PAM Duress – Alternate passwords for panic situations
#8There's always a big issue with systems like this: Any sophisticated attacker will have an image of the machine he's trying to get into at hand to stop exactly what this pam module is trying to achieve from happening.
All this would do is make you appear in a worse light to the deciding judge when it comes to trial or get your other kneecap shattered in a not so civil situation.
Re: PAM Duress – Alternate passwords for panic situations
#9You could set this up with three possible passwords, #1 for normal login, #2 for what looks like normal login but deletes most sensitive things and #3 that wipes the disk encryption keys and reboots. If forced by criminals or a not so free government enter #2 and pretend everything is normal. If pressured by the US or EU government with your lawyer present enter #3, see it fail and claim you forgot the encryption keys to make it boot (which is technically true, just never admit you made it delete them since that's illegal in most places)
Re: PAM Duress – Alternate passwords for panic situations
#10I remember Kali Linux had a patched LUKS implementation for full disk encryption with self destruction password
https://www.kali.org/blog/emergency-self-destruction-luks-ka...