91–100 of 358 posts
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I worked at a place where the duress code was ROT5: 1234 was your normal access code, 6789 lerted security.
You're supposed to ROT5 mentally while in a state of high stress?
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The duress credentials are exactly how you avoid the "pipe wrench" scenario. The point of the FDE in that case is simply to prevent them from looking on the disk without your supervision.
The duress credentials keep the pipe wrench from being useful . They don't keep it from being applied .
The duress credentials are meant to create plausible deniability of non-compliance, by giving the appearance of a genuine login which just reveals nothing.
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I do not understand why any security concerned person would use biometric identification for anything, ever.
Why would being security conscious automatically disqualify biometrics? Security is all about threat models, and I can imagine quite a few scenarios where biometrics might fare better than passwords. Shoulder surfing and trivial passwords/PINs come to mind, for example. And who said that it's biometrics vs. anything else? It's quite advisable to combine authentication factors.
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It would need to be baked into the OS. With FaceID, I guess I could use eyes crossed, as a queue.
That'd be neat. With Touch ID, it would be very intuitive to configure the middle finger as the trigger to run a duress script.
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…
An interesting way to use this PAM-Duress system would be to write a program that (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 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.
It’s been done before: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rufnWLVQcKg
There are multiple levels of protection one might want. 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 h…
I'm not sure if it's really that simple with modern flash storage. There might be no guarantee that attempting to overwrite some data will actually affect the particular memory cells where it is stored. You would probably have to trigger a secure erase to reset all memory cells and hope that it is correctly implemented by the storage device's firmware.
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The duress credentials keep the pipe wrench from being useful . They don't keep it from being applied .
If the pipe wrench is getting applied regardless, that's a much different situation. In that case you could simply not comply at all. The duress credentials are meant to create plausible deniability of non-compliance, by giving the appearance of a genuine login which just reveals nothing.
Or you could just be dealing with someone who DGAF. This ultimately seems to be a chief characteristic of many situations in which strong crypto is proposed. It's the breakdown of civil liberties, rights, and rule of law which might be the true ur-problem here.