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US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

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Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#211

Post by asdfxkcd »

Maybe also shows that the duress PIN feature could be implemented better. Booting into a completely fresh phone is suspicious. There also shouldn't be any visual or other indicators of that happening.

In the old TrueCrypt containers you could set an optional second password that would decrypt a different volume. The size of the container file was always the same, a decrypted volume always showed the full container size, the portion not occupied by the data in the main volume was filled with noise, and the data on the non-loaded volume was not protected (so you could erase it without warning by storing too much on the loaded volume), making it practically impossible to prove the existence of a second volume either way in a search situation. I guess there was a reason why the project was stopped.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#212

Post by president_zippy »

koolba wrote: post #80
reenorap wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have the duress PIN on sticker on your phone. Maybe put it backwards and don’t say anything to border patrol. Have them try it out and erase the phone and then you can legitimately say you didn’t do anything and they did it themselves.

Be funnier if you even write “do not enter 123456”.

That might have actually been legal. I'm not a lawyer, but it's definitely better for the accused than what happened in reality.

"I told you not to. You're the ones who wiped my phone. You owe me money for destroying my personal property."

I'm not saying you would get a check courtesy of Uncle Sam for your troubles, but the argument that you deceived authorities into destroying evidence is a lot weaker.

I might go with "do not enter 696969" instead because the stranger fiddling with your phone probably expects a your phone to do something funny, like load a shock site.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#213

Post by itake »

andrewflnr wrote: post #190

Why the hell doesn't the "duress PIN" just open up a sanitary profile? Bonus points for letting you set it up with plausible data before designating it as the duress profile that, when opened, wipes your real profile in the background . > "the screen went blank, flashed several times, and the phone appeared to restart," How about flash some red lights and play an airhorn sound effect, too.

Just a guess… but they would just go back and ask him for the real pin if they saw the profile was empty.

My understanding is phone’s security model aren’t designed for multiple user accounts

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#214

Post by bcrosby95 »

ludston wrote: post #179
mikeweiss wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's insulting

It is, and autism is just the swap-in vulnerable minority of the day that is socially acceptable to be the butt of the joke. If you don't understand what I mean, swap out "autistic" for "retarded" and the joke still functions, but a lot more people will be offended by it. I still laughed though.

Yeah, shit's re.... dumb I mean. It's interesting we're still allowed to use dumb this way.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#216

Post by rootusrootus »

reenorap wrote: post #47
sfRattan wrote: post #25

Ultimately, when you choose to enter a duress PIN that will wipe your device, you have to recognize that choice may have legal consequences. I don't like the amount of power our government has at the national border when it comes to detaining and pressuring citizens, but our Constitution explicitly grants it at least some of the power it now exercises in that context. If your threat model includes US state actors at…

Have the duress PIN on sticker on your phone. Maybe put it backwards and don’t say anything to border patrol. Have them try it out and erase the phone and then you can legitimately say you didn’t do anything and they did it themselves.

Or just make it your birthday. Though I'm not at all sure the agents will try typing random codes in without at least some idea that they may work, given that many OS's will quickly start to punish with tarpitting.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#217

Post by ndiddy »

halestock wrote: post #79
cameldrv wrote: post #74

I’ve seen a lot of people on the internet over the years say things like “the government can’t make x illegal, it’s just y.” For example, the government can’t make wiping your phone at the border illegal, it’s just punching four numbers into your phone, just like a pin, only a different four numbers, which could just have well been your pin. U.S. law though is highly non-autistic and what you were trying to do is jus…

A lot of engineer types forget that the law is not code, and reductionist arguments almost never actually work in practice because it's a human interpreting the law.

For one example of this, around 10 years ago there was a company called Aereo that tried to act as a "cloud television provider". The idea was that they had thousands of tiny antennas hooked up to servers in a warehouse, and they would lease an antenna to each subscriber. This gave an experience similar to cable TV but without Aereo having to pay broadcasters cable transmission fees. The major broadcasters sued Aereo and ended up getting it shut down for exactly the reason you mention. Despite Aereo technically being a TV antenna leasing service, it functionally acted like a cable TV service so they were violating copyright by not paying transmission fees.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#218

Post by jauntywundrkind »

teravor wrote: post #16
Grimblewald wrote: post #2

VeraCrypt has a cool function which is a reserved space for a decoy OS.[1] Everything else registers as free space while decrypting to dummy volume. You make the dummy volume look lived in, and forget. provide dummy password, volume decrypts such that only dummy is accessible/readable. give proper password, real OS and FS decrypt and load. Something like this may need to become the standars over duress pins which sho…

this will likely fail as block devices aren't dumb anymore, the firmware state will out the hidden volume. counting on the laziness/unsophistication of an adversary isn't a great move. this problem may be solvable by a purpose-built abstraction where every write no matter what address will look identical to the firmware (naively, a randomized key-value map).

I agree that trying to outcompete seems really hard, but also:

Given what the experience of using a non-rooted phone is like, how very very tight the sandboxing is and how useless it is a General Purpose Computer that will tell you anything: I find it very hard to believe the unlocked phone is going to let you start probing firmware & snooping on hidden volumes.

This post sent my BS detector on high alert. I'm struggling to take it seriously.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#219

Post by AngryData »

tripleee wrote: post #77
AngryData wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile cops can and do regularly deceive and lie to citizen and not only don't face any consequences but actively benefit from it.

I don't really see a problem with this assuming the deception is used to uncover crimes.

So government officials can lie but citizens must tell the truth all the time? That is insane to me and I don't see how that does anything other than force people into perpetual criminality so that they could be arrested at any time. The average US citizen already commits 3 crimes a day because our justice system is so messed up.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#220

Post by hyperion2010 »

I suspect that this will ultimately be thrown out for a very simple reason which is that the government will have to prove that a duress PIN was actually entered. That is going to be quite difficult unless the person charged openly admitted it.

The reason is because anyone running an os with a duress PIN that has done nothing wrong can be accused of using a duress PIN because the whole point of the duress PIN is that it looks like you just have a normal phone.

Running a normal apple operating system with just stock apps? Boom, you're a criminal because you obviously used a duress PIN and have something to hide! There is no way to prove you didn't use a duress PIN because the phone was "wiped."

Now unfortunately grapheneos probably leaks information so that a duress "unlock" can be differentiated from a standard unlock by some means. If not then kudos. It looks like it is done instantly by keeping everything encrypted and just zapping the keys, but it also needs to actually unlock to something instead of rebooting to prevent leaking the information that a duress pin was used. Not sure how fiesable that would be though.

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