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What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

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Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#71

Post by nfoz »

shawn-butler wrote: post #31
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 wonder if there isn't a fledgling niche business opportunity here for security-minded but not tech-saavy business travelers? Rather than leaving it at home, a trusted third-party service could supply a image/reimaging service at popular travel endpoints. A lot of risk in it I suppose.

> a trusted third-party service

That's a big problem.

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#72

Post by alextingle »

mschuster91 wrote: post #20
nmc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course this is possible. You can even take it a step further: full disk encryption, one key will give an innocent Windows install, and another key will give the diabolical plans. However, information is only compressible to the extent of redundancy involved, so this can be spotted: compare the amount of encrypted data with the size of the innocent data.

There's an even bigger weakness: timestamps in files and the Windows event log. These will show if your "innocent" OS hasn't been booted for $long_time...

Just reset the hardware clock back whenever you power off. The pretend your clock is three years out of whack, and that you don't care. Hey presto - your ancient windows install looks "fresh".

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#73

Post by dotBen »

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.

I had my laptop searched during this time by a CBP officer at the US border in Calgary airport. There was no documentation of the event and the only 'receipt' I got was a pamphlet telling me that it was legal and what my rights were (none really).

My point is I highly doubt the extent is as little as 1,000 as most searches are not logged.

(I'm not a US Citizen, so my rights were further limited given US had no obligation to let me in)

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#74

Post by jasomill »

logfromblammo wrote: post #55
Shivetya wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When border patrol agents are looking for narcotics, do you honestly think they pass over the guy carrying rolling papers in favor of the one carrying nothing remotely suspicious due to lack of evidence of vice looking "staged" in the latter case? What's different about a porn- and photo-free hard drive full of boring business reports and uninteresting browser histories?

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#75

Post by mindslight »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #69
mindslight wrote: post #65

This has been the case for some time, and I doubt the unaccountable bureaucracy is going to change. So the only thing we can do is disrespect, mitigate, and undermine. Here was my ad-hoc procedure from traveling internationally a few months ago (tourism), with a prior of not really expecting to be hassled on the way there, but unknown for the way back: 1. Choose the laptop I'm least likely to miss in the case it gets…

What tools could be used to boot off a trusted, non-writable USB stick to checksum the BIOS? Difficulty level: Macbook Air

Well, that's a completely different problem. If you travel frequently and your gear gets stolen for a few days at every border crossing? At the very least, I'd look into a laptop that was easily field-strippable, and figure out how to verify non-volatile storage with an external device, at least on return. And never fully trust the machine again either. Note that this problem is what TPMs purport to solve, but that doesn't help you against a major government which will demand a backdoor from the manufacturer.

My laptop was never touched by customs - had it been, my plan was to never trust the machine again.

Most people are in my situation - never actually getting hassled but wanting to protect themselves now that the gloves are coming off. In the future we all may have to deal with device quarantines of a few days at every crossing (what a boon to local sellers!) but that's not now.

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#76

Post by powertower »

dotBen wrote: post #73
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.

I had my laptop searched during this time by a CBP officer at the US border in Calgary airport. There was no documentation of the event and the only 'receipt' I got was a pamphlet telling me that it was legal and what my rights were (none really) . My point is I highly doubt the extent is as little as 1,000 as most searches are not logged. (I'm not a US Citizen, so my rights were further limited given US had no oblig…

Are you sure it was searched (indexed or imaged) rather than just checked (powered on and/or checked for hidden contraband)?

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#77

Post by oracuk »

blueskin_ wrote: post #24
oracuk wrote: post #23

I have seen the corporate response of only providing remote desktops via browser and SSL to foreign (US) deployed personnel. Means the data never physically crosses the border. No clear players in this market for consumers though. Where is the consumer remote desktop via browser+SSL that doesn't rely on a US hosted cloud service?

>Where is the consumer remote desktop via browser+SSL that doesn't rely on a US hosted cloud service? The one you host on your own infrastructure?

Which software? Remote Desktop + SSL.

I don't know of a good self-hosted combination for that.

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#78

Post by daxelrod »

drdaeman wrote: post #67
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…

Isn't BIOS passwords useless? For non-soldered but socketed BIOSes I think one can just take chip out and put it into your wallet, possibly, covering some pins with some dissolvable insulating substance. For soldered SPI EEPROM chips with known pinout, I think one can reflash the chip afterwards.

BIOS passwords are not always useless, depending on model.

I had a Thinkpad T42 on which I managed to set a password for editing BIOS settings that I did not remember.

I the laptop into IBM for repairs to the monitor, and as part of their repairs they needed to get into the BIOS settings (I believe to run a diagnostic). Their solution was to replace the entire motherboard.

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#79

Post by drdaeman »

daxelrod wrote: post #78
drdaeman wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't BIOS passwords useless? For non-soldered but socketed BIOSes I think one can just take chip out and put it into your wallet, possibly, covering some pins with some dissolvable insulating substance. For soldered SPI EEPROM chips with known pinout, I think one can reflash the chip afterwards.

BIOS passwords are not always useless, depending on model. I had a Thinkpad T42 on which I managed to set a password for editing BIOS settings that I did not remember. I the laptop into IBM for repairs to the monitor, and as part of their repairs they needed to get into the BIOS settings (I believe to run a diagnostic). Their solution was to replace the entire motherboard.

Well, guess it were hardware types, who performed the repairs, or they just didn't have necessary equipment (an AVR board like Arduino or PC with an old parallel "LPT" port will suffice, hardware-wise) at hand, so it was easier for them to solve it that way. :)

I was 99% positive the same could be achieved by messing with EEPROM. And, indeed, less than 10 minutes of searching yielded this unsurprising result: http://arduino.ada-language.com/recovering-ibm-thinkpad-t42-...

tl;dr: Nope, T42's BIOS password is not secure if you allow anyone with necessary hardware to touch the motherboard for a minute. TPM may (depending on the laptop model and firmware revision) prevent password recovery but will likely not prevent anyone from resetting them - at least this seems to be the case with Thinkpads. Next time I'll clean dust from my X300, maybe I'll remember this thread and check its EEPROM too. :)

So, do not rely on BIOS passwords as a strong security measure.

Re: What happens if authorities seize your laptop?

#80

Post by dotBen »

powertower wrote: post #76
dotBen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had my laptop searched during this time by a CBP officer at the US border in Calgary airport. There was no documentation of the event and the only 'receipt' I got was a pamphlet telling me that it was legal and what my rights were (none really) . My point is I highly doubt the extent is as little as 1,000 as most searches are not logged. (I'm not a US Citizen, so my rights were further limited given US had no oblig…

Are you sure it was searched (indexed or imaged) rather than just checked (powered on and/or checked for hidden contraband)?

It all comes down to semantics, doesn't it?

It wasn't imaged or indexed but the officer sat down and looked through it for quite some time.

I think you asked people what they thought the 1000 searches consisted of, they would include a CBP officer going through the contents of a laptop as a "search".

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