Can't prove a negative, after all...
It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked
31–40 of 134 posts
Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked
#32QubesOS Anti Evil Maid: https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/09/07/anti-evil-maid.h...
> The adjective trusted, in trusted boot, means that the goal of the mechanism is to somehow attest to a user that only desired (trusted) components have been loaded and executed during the system boot. It's a common mistake to confuse it with what is sometimes called secure boot, whose purpose is to prevent any unauthorized component from executing.
Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked
#33I sometimes think there may be a gap for simpler technology where it's easier to ensure nothing's hacked. Like if you have a raspberry pi zero with software on a flash drive and check the hash on all the stuff in the flash drive.
Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked
#34> But due to various time-consuming and annoying issues related to Windows updates, I eventually chose to abandon Windows altogether and just run Debian on my honeypot laptop
You know things are bad when people are annoyed by an operating system they dont even use!
Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked
#35I thought it was impossible to prove a negative, generally?
I think you have got a bit confused here. For example Fermat's Last Theorem is effectively "a negative": "no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2"
[deleted]
Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do this with the ExpressCard slot on my ThinkPad, not because I'm paranoid but because I like to experiment with many OSs and it's easier to manage than messing with partitions and bootloaders. I appreciate how the ExpressCard SSDs don't stick out of the laptop at all. I keep all my user data on the internal drive though (encrypted), so my risk to unattended laptop hijinks isn't much mitigated.
Good skills mate. So: Your user data is on the HDD and encrypted AND you use a removable disc to boot your machine AND you have a "something you know" (password) That looks quite secure to me, provided you look after your removable disc and password. I'm not familiar with IBM gear - is ExpressCard a removable disc? I tried to read the WP page on it but got confused. I have one of these for my laptop - Dell Inspiron 1…
ExpressCard is the succesor to PCMCIA. It's not limited to disks, you can also get cellular modems, gps cards, or whatever. The drives I use are these: http://www.wintecind.com/features/filemate/ssd/wf_expresscar...
I agree my setup is probably pretty secure, but not any moreso than a single os install with FDE, especially since I often leave an OS ExpressCard in the machine and the other ones I leave scattered around my desk...
Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked
#37I could never work in security. I worry enough as it is, without it being my job to worry.
Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked
#38"But given that current defenses against detecting processor-level backdoors wouldn’t spot their A2 attack, they argue that a new method is required: Specifically, they say that modern chips need to have a trusted component that constantly checks that programs haven’t been granted inappropriate operating-system-level privileges. Ensuring the security of that component, perhaps by building it in secure facilities or making sure the design isn’t tampered with before fabrication, would be far easier than ensuring the same level of trust for the entire chip."
They admit that implementing their fix could take time and money. But without it, their proof-of-concept is intended to show how deeply and undetectably a computer’s security could be corrupted before it’s ever sold. “I want this paper to start a dialogue between designers and fabricators about how we establish trust in our manufactured hardware,” says Austin. “We need to establish trust in our manufacturing, or something very bad will happen.”
https://www.wired.com/2016/06/demonically-clever-backdoor-hi...
Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tens of millions of laptops have been exposed to at least as much evil maid opportunity as the author's. That's either a much stronger natural experiment than his artificial one, or the biggest sleeper attack in history. Like, the Israelis still had to blow up the centrifuge eventually...
I tend to specify a fair amount of tin foil when buying a hat and I also suspect you are correct with this assertion: Tens of millions of laptops have been exposed to at least as much evil maid opportunity as the author's However, do you have a decent citation for that assertion?
Pure handwave. Let's call an "exposure" a one-way trip plus half the hotel stay. So the author's laptop got (3+5) * 2 = 16 exposures.
Air passengers make about 3B trips per year. A laptop lasts about three years. I said "tens of millions", so if I'm right then we have at least 16 * 20M exposures on existing laptops. That would mean at least one passenger in 28 travels with a laptop and is as careless as the author was.
That seems high to me--like, it's not too common to check your laptop (unless you were flying from an Arab country last year...). On the other hand, that ignores opportunities before the laptop's first retail sale. Those seem more attractive to me--more time to work, less diverse hardware, etc.--and almost every laptop sold is exposed that way.
So my comment above was probably too flip. His experiment still seems pointless to me, though.
Re: It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked
#40I thought it was impossible to prove a negative, generally?
I think you have got a bit confused here. For example Fermat's Last Theorem is effectively "a negative": "no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2"
That phrase applies basically everywhere else except math. It's only possible to prove a negative in mathematics because it's a fully logical system.
On a side note Fermat's Last Theorem isn't a good counterexample because it hasn't been proven yet either.