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What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#51

Post by valarauca1 »

zacinbusiness wrote: post #49
valarauca1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only real test is to make it open source. There isn't a lot of money in cryto done correctly, that is closed source. Because without public audits its impossible to know you've done it correctly, and even if you have, the public perception will be you haven't due to its closed-source-something-to-hide nature.

Makes sense to me. I've always wanted to get involved in a cool open source project. Anyone want to get this started? Make it a free time activity or something? Or are there already better solutions out there? No need to reinvent the wheel.

Not in this direct line of software of the encrypt multiple documents and only out 1 based on pass-phrase, this would be unique (as far as I can tell).

True crypt tells you how to set this up, but not do this automatically. Also it would require you selecting which volume, not just "insert password get document"

This would offer a higher degree of plausible-deniablity, and portability, by making it a file its not tied to one location. The structure of the file, and multiple hashes also grant plausable deniability why you can't just decrypt the entire file in one go and compare the 2 documents SHA hashes.

Would it stand up in court? No. It would help avoid less tech savvy people.

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#52

Post by raybeorn »

kijin wrote: post #45
joshka wrote: post #11

"Or you can scrub your laptop clean, storing everything on an external hard drive that you leave at home. Then you know you are safe from prying authorities, at least at the border." That is unless you believe that those prying authorities have the will and the way to leave an undetectable backdoor in your laptop. Breaking the chain of custody in any laptop today is akin to destruction of trust in that device. Who is…

> Who is responsible then for paying for this damage? Craigslist. Or eBay, or Kijiji, or the Classified section of your local newspaper. Whatever lets you get rid of your possibly contaminated device while recouping at least part of the cost. The difference between the price of the new device and the amount you can recoup by selling it secondhand, multiplied by the probability that your device will indeed be seized,…

Would you disclose that it is possibly tainted or are you ok with possibly screwing over the next owner of the device?

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#53

Post by jrockway »

joshka wrote: post #11

"Or you can scrub your laptop clean, storing everything on an external hard drive that you leave at home. Then you know you are safe from prying authorities, at least at the border." That is unless you believe that those prying authorities have the will and the way to leave an undetectable backdoor in your laptop. Breaking the chain of custody in any laptop today is akin to destruction of trust in that device. Who is…

Doesn't secure boot help with this? Unless you believe that the DHS has somehow convinced Intel (etc.) to break the TPM in some way that is quickly exploitable at the border and that nobody has noticed.

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#54

Post by logfromblammo »

nekgrim wrote: post #2

1. Backup your documents on Dropbox/GDrive/Whatever (edit: can be you personal server. You can use Truecrypt, and not upload your datas uncrypted. The point is that you must not have the datas on your pc when you pass the border). 2. Wipe your PC. Optional 2.5. Download a bunch of fake personal files. 3. Pass the border. 4. Access Internet. 5. Download your datas.

Optional 2.75: Install every crapware toolbar available on the Internet, allocate all free disk space to browser cache, and fill it up with obnoxious ads.

Requires a second wipe after step 3, and may get you into trouble, depending on what the crapware does without your input.

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#55

Post by logfromblammo »

Shivetya wrote: post #6
nekgrim wrote: post #2

1. Backup your documents on Dropbox/GDrive/Whatever (edit: can be you personal server. You can use Truecrypt, and not upload your datas uncrypted. The point is that you must not have the datas on your pc when you pass the border). 2. Wipe your PC. Optional 2.5. Download a bunch of fake personal files. 3. Pass the border. 4. Access Internet. 5. Download your datas.

With the recent history of topics here about the NSA having back doors into providers of services how is uploading your data where you suggest actually going to protect you? If anything, I would go to the point of screwing with border agents by having tens of thousands of pictures of my dogs, kids, flowers, and whatnot, all with naming similar to PICnnnnn or whatever is the current default of most digital cameras. Ha…

Make sure you include a few vanilla porn pics and only slightly embarrassing drunken party photos. If they don't find some evidence of vice, they will suspect it was just staged data, and they might keep digging.

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#56

Post by javajosh »

nhaehnle wrote: post #22
joshka wrote: post #11

"Or you can scrub your laptop clean, storing everything on an external hard drive that you leave at home. Then you know you are safe from prying authorities, at least at the border." That is unless you believe that those prying authorities have the will and the way to leave an undetectable backdoor in your laptop. Breaking the chain of custody in any laptop today is akin to destruction of trust in that device. Who is…

I would second this. We know for a fact that the NSA uses BIOS malware. I don't believe we know for a fact that such malware is routinely installed by border guards, but it's not a very far-fetched worry at this point. The technical expertise required to do so is very limited as long as you don't password-protect the BIOS: Basically, they only need to be able to plug in a USB stick and reconfigure the BIOS to boot fr…

Do MacBooks have the option to password protect the BIOS?

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#57

Post by avn2109 »

pogden wrote: post #28
mcdougle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reimage it again when you get home? edit: To those below: True. I thought about hardware after I posted; didn't even think about the BIOS thing but that's a great point.

Hardware keylogger.

That autonomously phones home so they don't even have to borrow your laptop next time you fly in order to dump the data.

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#58

Post by ddinh »

javajosh wrote: post #56
nhaehnle wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would second this. We know for a fact that the NSA uses BIOS malware. I don't believe we know for a fact that such malware is routinely installed by border guards, but it's not a very far-fetched worry at this point. The technical expertise required to do so is very limited as long as you don't password-protect the BIOS: Basically, they only need to be able to plug in a USB stick and reconfigure the BIOS to boot fr…

Do MacBooks have the option to password protect the BIOS?

Yes, you can set an EFI password on Macbooks: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1352

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#59

Post by wvenable »

powertower wrote: post #36

> Between October 2008-August 2009, for example, more than 220 million people travelled to and from the US , according to Department of Homeland Security officials. > During that time authorities searched about 1,000 laptops carried by travellers. We don't live in the police state that most Snowden and Kim Dotcom supporters here tell us that we do. I get really tired of seeing anecdotes used to represent the average.

If you are a political activist, it seems the odds of getting your laptop searched is many orders of magnitude greater than the general population.

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#60

Post by kps »

salient wrote: post #38

From what I hear, SSD's can't be wiped completely, so be careful with such laptops (Macbook Airs, etc).

Theoretically true, but practically misleading.

Each block of flash can be written only a limited number of times, so flash drives (SSDs, cards, USB sticks) all have more blocks than are visible as part of the disk. Drives internally rotate active blocks in and out of the spare pool to try to keep the number of writes to each similar ('wear levelling'). When you write to a flash drive — including trying to overwrite data to destroy it as someone might on a magnetic disk — it will generally pull a block from the spare pool for the new data, and put the old block in the spare pool.

The spare pool is invisible to the OS, but it is reasonable to assume that there are ‘secret’ commands to access it — not because some TLA demands it, but because the hardware/firmware engineers need it for development and debugging.

BUT there is a great big BUT. Writing flash is a two-step process. Programming flash can only change a 1 bit to a 0. Before this, there has to be a slower erase step, that sets the block to all 1s. In order to avoid this performance-killing overhead on every write, flash drives erase as much as possible (whether spare pool blocks or TRIMmed visible blocks) in the background as soon as possible.

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