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The "guy with the gun" narrative comes up a lot, so this seems to counter that? I love the concept. It seems like something that would work well in a movie but fail miserably in real life.
The Hello World example shows echoing to stdout from the duress script. Seems like a bad idea. I don't want to get beaten or shot when some rm -rf fails with an I/O error, alerting the attacker to what's going on. It seems like it would be more sensible for the module to suppress all output by design.
rm -rf /secret/files > /dev/null 2>&1
It'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.
Exactly. It would be great to have a secondary pin (or my middle finger fingerprint, for example) in my phone to enter in a dummy environment with a few games, some family pics and so.
The company that was pitching my employer retina scanners on data center doors 20 years ago had an idea like this. Left eye gets you in, right eye gets you in and alerts security.
This is also very typical for regular alarm systems with a keypad. A PIN disarms the alarms system, the same PIN + 1 disarms the alarm system and notifies security.
I.e. when you are being selected for random questioning entering US as a non-US citizen, you'd benefit from steganography-like approach: you give a password, and relatively bland, non-personal stuff shows up, giving appearance of full access to a system.
If you only care about your privacy, the next one is to have a destroy-everything script (and it's not that hard: usually, passphrases are only used to decrypt the actual encryption keys, so overwriting those keys should be super fast). This would also work against unsophisticated attacks which are not going to really cost you your life.
If there is a potential for you to be a target of a sophisticated attack and the attacker does not care about taking your life, the biggest benefit is to have a way to inform someone of your whereabouts while you are actually giving access, ideally in a way that buys you time (eg. "webcam has detected stress on your face, please wait another 6 hours before trying to log in again" — sorry, company mandated software, when it happens usually, we call support).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The duress login shouldn't reveal that anything is happening, so they have no reason to suspect you're using such a feature at all. Thus there would be no reason to ask you to log in again, and even if they do, you can simply use the duress credentials a second time.
If they can monitor network connections, they can see the duress connections, too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your attacker has a full image of your system why are they bothering with duress?
Also depending on the jurisdiction depending on the circumstances triggering it can be a felony the same as destroying evidence or tampering with an investigation, if a court compelled you congrats you’ve just earned yourself a contempt of court charge that can last pretty indefinitely. In a jurisdiction that doesn’t adhere to the rule of law you are already screwed. What people often don’t seem to comprehend is that…
What I never quite understand is how this can work in practice. When someone is under real duress, they do not always behave in a logical way and may be too stressed to remember certain details like a password that they never use...
Training is very important in duress systems. I once worked in a place with a keypad duress code on the security system. If you prefixed your security PIN with NN-, it was the duress version of the code and would trigger a silent alarm. This was setup long-ago, and not communicated. One night, the keypad was acting glitchy. Partially out of frustration (countdown is running), and partially to test, I ended up acciden…
(a) begins recording your microphone and webcam video immediately upon login
(b) Aggressively try the hell out of every passwordless Wi-Fi network it can detect, then use headless chrome to aggressively smack every button to get past the stupid login pages
(c) Stream that video and audio to a server that saves it.
The Hello World example shows echoing to stdout from the duress script. Seems like a bad idea. I don't want to get beaten or shot when some rm -rf fails with an I/O error, alerting the attacker to what's going on. It seems like it would be more sensible for the module to suppress all output by design.
Just do this in your script rm -rf /secret/files > /dev/null 2>&1 That pipes STDOUT to /dev/null and redirects STDERR to STDOUT.