
It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked - wglb
https://theintercept.com/2018/04/28/computer-malware-tampering/
======
cameldrv
If you're a target of a major intelligence agency, I think that you have to
assume that all of your computers are irretrievably compromised. From Vault 7,
we know that the CIA has long developed implants to infect both the EFI and
hard drive firmware that load before any potential code that could detect
them. These could be made arbitrarily hard to detect without physically
opening the computer and dumping these flash devices and comparing them
against a known good image. Who knows what other embedded processors with a
little bit of flash lurk in various peripherals in your laptop that they've
figured out how to wheedle their way into... If the flash is integrated into
the microcontroller itself, there may not even be an easy way of reliably
dumping its contents.

~~~
gerdesj
I think you are absolutely correct with your assessment. I recall Alan Cox
(welsh bloke, big beard, Linux kernel hacker (well: simply hacker in general
will do)) posting on G+ about someone booting enough Linux on a hard disc to
get a prompt. No not the disc itself, off the firmware on the controller.

You may also like to consider that nearly all modern server systems have an
iLO/iDRAC or whatever that can do all sorts of things, and at least one
internal USB interface. PCs can have the Intel ME and other horrors. The best
you can hope for is that it is only your local intel. agency that potentially
have routine access to your system.

~~~
garaetjjte
[http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1](http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1)

~~~
gerdesj
Thanks for that. Its always nice to read up on a really good hack or be
reacquainted with one and this is a belter.

------
tripletao
If you care about this, then put the laptop in a tamper-evident bag. Those are
necessarily imperfect too; but there's work making tamper-evident seals to
resist up to state-level attacks, since that's relevant in stuff like
enforcement of nuclear weapons treaties. That succeeds to the extent that you
can find a physical effect that's easy to create and measure, but hard to
recreate deterministically. (In concept, dump a pile of glitter over your
thing. The effort to dump the glitter, take two pictures, and compare is
small. The effort to recreate a given glitter distribution flake by flake is
large. Likewise for laser speckle from random rough surfaces, and many other
effects.)

You could check a laptop for malware later by reading out literally every bit
of nonvolatile state, including the BIOS and stuff, and confirming that all
changes had expected form (to files you meant to work on, etc.). Of course,
then you have to trust the equipment you use for that...

A little weird that he ran the experiment. Did he really suspect that malware
was routinely getting installed by attackers with physical access to laptops
during business travel? If yes, then why didn't someone notice it calling home
or whatever?

~~~
zx2c4
> If you care about this, then put the laptop in a tamper-evident bag.

How does this procedure work for multiday evil maid situations? The first day
while you're out the maid replaces your collection of plastic disposable
tamper-evident bags with faulty ones that open with a particular chemical but
otherwise look identical. The second day the maid tampers with your laptop and
you don't notice. Do you just have to take the whole box of additional bags
with you everyday? That seems prohibitively inconvenient.

~~~
tripletao
If this were a job interview, then I'd say "put the spare bags in with the
laptop"...

Or the "bag" can be the laptop's existing case. You can put seals (stickers,
or the sparkly nail polish trick mentioned below) over all the fasteners and
seams of the laptop, fill all the non-power ports with epoxy, etc. None of
these make tampering impossible, but they can make it uneconomic.

I don't think anyone at serious risk of these kinds of attacks lets computers
out of their physical control. I've seen agencies that do the seals/epoxy even
for computers inside their secure facilities, presumably to give their guards
more time to catch an inside tamperer.

------
chias
An excellent companion-read to the linked article is:
[http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23](http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)

It builds up a concept of "Colour" as describing information _about_ a thing
(distinct from metadata / tagging) which is not necessarily derivable from the
thing itself. Most frequently it uses the term to describe _provenance_ , but
is careful not to limit the concept. To quote the ansuz' essay above in
relation to the linked article:

 _When we use Colour like that to protect ourselves against viruses or
malicious input, we 're using the Colour to conservatively approximate a
difficult or impossible to compute function of the bits. Either our operating
system is infected, or it is not. A given sequence of bits either is an
infected file or isn't, and the same sequence of bits will always be either
infected or not. Disinfecting a file changes the bits. Infected or not is a
function, not a Colour. The trouble is that because any of our files might be
infected including the tools we would use to test for infection, we can't
reliably compute the "is infected" function, so we use Colour to approximate
"is infected" with something that we can compute and manage - namely "might be
infected". Note that "might be infected" is not a function; the same file can
be "might be infected" or "not (might be infected)" depending on where it came
from. That is a Colour._

Once you've left your computer alone with a potential adversary, it has the
might-be-compromised Colour. Proving whether it definitely has or has not been
compromised is easy for devices which do not have this Colour, but as
described in the linked-to article, very difficult or impossible once it has
this Colour.

------
salawat
I'm calling this a bad test in general.

Let's be honest here. None of the more cutting edge attacks are going to be
risked by attacking. as hard a target as this guy. The level of sophistication
of attack the author is starting to reach is going to be reserved for state-
level persons-of-interest.

Espionage is a game of judging capabilities, and cracking some security
researcher's laptop telegraphs to the rest of the world that you can. As a
national actor you don't actually WANT to flex your spy muscles in obvious
ways unless the payoff is JUST THAT CRITICAL. It removes the veil of the
unknown, and gives potential adversaries/persons-of-interest that much better
a chance of successfully applying tradecraft to hide what you actually want to
monitor because they have more accurate knowledge of what your capabilities
are. Contrary to popular belief, most organiztions capable of pulling an evil
maid attack simply won't because of the revelation of capability already
mentioned, and the PRISM problem. Too much information/access in general lends
itself to becoming useless due to the difficulty of separating the tasty bits
from the mundane.

Kudos to the guy for actually trying the experiment, but it doesn't really
tell anyone anything we didn't already know 20 years ago.

Computers are inherently insecure. Every form of "security" is insecure at
some point. Computers haven't changed anything except for making a person's
computer a juicy target to get some juicy financial information/passwords for
non-state actors, or making surveillance potentialities so much more
horrifying on account of the ubiquity of networked cameras, sensors, and
microphones on the ground waiting to be exploited.

Forget about laptop evil maid attacks. Start thinking about the ticking time
bomb of 'poisoned' hardware rife with 'tailored access' whereby state actors
can push a button and have every device with a camera/microphone within a
certain set of GPS coordinates start silently acting as an input sensor.
Combine that data stream with the right neural networks, and you'll see a
world that no one in their right mind wants, but is well within our
manufacturing capabilities to create.

Or stop worrying, go outside, and make a friend. It's way better for your
mental health.

~~~
SpaceEncroacher
Yeah, have fun, ball til you fall, go all out, maximize the moment - and give
thanks.

------
cbanek
While this is focused on hardware and physical access, it would seem that it's
the same for software. You don't know if someone has control over it remotely,
through any number of means (browser, downloaded software, installed
professional software with backdoors, software with unreleased
vulnerabilities, etc.). Even airgapped machines can be compromised (Stuxnet,
TEMPEST).

Even if you built all the binaries from scratch from the official repos, you'd
still be at risk of security bugs like heartbleed, or a compromised compiler.

In the end, I think security is always a numbers game. Someone can always get
to your protected resources, it's just a matter of how much the attacker wants
it.

It's easier to attack a resource than defend it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_\(codename\))
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed)

------
jensv
"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...](https://www.wired.com/2016/06/demonically-clever-backdoor-hides-inside-
computer-chip/)

~~~
jlgaddis
It seems that you posted your comment on the wrong article.

------
jaclaz
Thesis: it is possible that someone may access your laptop without you knowing
if you leave it unattended.

Experiment: after having gone through a number of - some meaningless[1] -
attempts to be able to proof that this happened, there was no evidence it
happened.

Doubt: did it happen nonetheless without leaving any trace ot it din't
actually happened at all?

Bonus: the experimenter learned that NVRAM exists in the stupid UEFI firmware

Conclusion: None worth mentioning, but be very aware of what the terrible evil
maids can do, and do use the recommended Android app to defend against them.

[1] Hashing a whole hard disk is only a "positive" proof, if the hashes
correspond nothing changed, but it is very possible that the hashes change
because of _any_ filesystem or disk issue if the system is used, so the method
is pointless in the real world, where people bring with them a laptop in order
to use it.

~~~
boomboomsubban
>Thesis: it is possible that someone may access your laptop without you
knowing if you leave it unattended.

This is known to be true, this experiment was about seeing if anyone would
access this laptop. Which also addresses what you view as meaningless, real
world scenarios are trying to avoid their laptop being compromised while the
author was hoping that it would.

~~~
jaclaz
I know that it is true, it is actually a truism.

The "experiment" has too few data points to be meaningful, and the proposed
way to verify remains meaningless, two simple cases:

1) the evil maid simply makes a forensic image of the disk

2) a sector in the hard disk goes bad

Case 1: there was an intrusion, all the data was stolen, but the hashes do not
show that (false negative)

Case 2: there was NOT any intrusion, but the hashes show that there was a
change (false positive)

~~~
boomboomsubban
>The "experiment" has too few data points to be meaningful, and the proposed
way to verify remains meaningless, two simple cases:

This isn't science, we know this is possible and the "experiment" was to try
and find examples of it happening.

A false negative is always assumed, it is impossible to know you haven't been
compromised. A false positive is meaningless as finding a change is only the
first step. You then need to analyze what the change is, and if you can't pin
down what has been compromised you're just back to the default state of
unaware.

This is a honeypot. If you leave your honeypot and return to an empty one,
you're pretty sure a bear is around but can't do anything. If you find a bear
with their paws in the pot, you don't need to run the experiment again to
prove there's a bear.

------
Jedd
I run a dual-boot Debian + Windows 7 laptop, but my default position is to
assume the Windows partition is exploitable, so for secure activities I boot
Debian.

That boots using an unencrypted /boot partition, but everything else running
on luks (one big partition, LVM'd down). I have a VeraCrypt partition which is
for files that I want to work on from both operating systems. Works really
well, crypted disks doesn't materially impact performance, and gives peace of
mind.

The most likely scenario for theft is someone after the hardware, and they'll
not spend much effort trying to break into the file system.

I'd be wary if the machine was stolen and then returned, but restoring mbr &
/boot partition should be sufficient in that instance.

I've travelled to regions that I considered dubious, if not especially
technically sophisticated. I haven't done this, however research suggested the
best way of confirming your laptop hasn't been opened is to use a sparkling
nail varnish. Dab a small amount on some or all of the case screws, take a
close-up photo, store that photo somewhere safe. After the event, take photos
of the screws again, and compare. The random patterns are effectively
impossible to replicate.

Combined with disabling USB booting, and BIOS admin password, and keeping the
OS in sleep -- it _should_ be possible to prove your laptop hasn't been hacked
via physical intrusion.

~~~
dingo_bat
> but my default position is to assume the Windows partition is exploitable

In reality, as the article explains, the windows partition is basically
invulnerable to this class of attacks if you take the 5 minutes to enable
bitlocker. OTOH Linux systems have no effective defense.

~~~
jjess
BitLocker stores your encryption keys on a Microsoft server [1] and is a
closed-source software, therefore by definition it cannot be trusted for
encrypting anything important. (It is wrong even if your adversary is not a
state, because that way you are getting used to a false sense of security that
you don't actually have.)

[1] [https://theintercept.com/2015/12/28/recently-bought-a-
window...](https://theintercept.com/2015/12/28/recently-bought-a-windows-
computer-microsoft-probably-has-your-encryption-key/)

~~~
ams6110
It's an option to store your keys on their server, but not a requirement. At
least not the last time I set up BitLocker. In fact that computer didn't even
have the on board Secure Storage thing that it prefers, so I had to make a
note of the recovery key on paper.

------
transpute
QubesOS Anti Evil Maid: [https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/09/07/anti-
evil-maid.h...](https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/09/07/anti-evil-
maid.html)

 _> 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._

------
gerdesj
_Computers that support “secure boot” or “verified boot,” such as Chromebooks
and Windows laptops with BitLocker, aren’t vulnerable to this. The BIOS can
detect if the unencrypted part of your disk has been tampered with, and if it
has, it will refuse to boot. MacBooks and laptops that run Linux could
potentially be attacked in this way._

Really?

(Search terms used: "secure boot linux" and "secure boot macbook")

[https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/take-control-your-pc-
ue...](https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/take-control-your-pc-uefi-secure-
boot)

[https://www.macworld.com/article/3246208/macs/how-apples-
sta...](https://www.macworld.com/article/3246208/macs/how-apples-startup-
security-utility-and-secure-boot-works.html)

~~~
agorabinary
Also curious about Linux vulnerabilities to this particular attack - any Linux
wizards in thread?

~~~
tombrossman
Not a Linux wizard but as a long time user, I remembered this 2012 news from
Canonical: [http://blog.canonical.com/2012/06/22/an-update-on-ubuntu-
and...](http://blog.canonical.com/2012/06/22/an-update-on-ubuntu-and-secure-
boot/)

Perhaps the author meant there was no 'universal' Linux implementation,
however it's been available for a while in certain distros.

------
efp
Had to register to share this oldie but goodie:

[https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack](https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack)

------
wpdev_63
The first company that makes a truly open source, security vetted computer
will be very rich. When I say open source, I mean open source circuit design,
bootloader, OS etc. The complete stack. The surveillance state is here and we
need the tools to fight it!

Right now every national "security" agency(usa, china, uk) is racing to create
a truly comprehensive suite of tools to monitor its citizens en masse[0][1].
Exploits for every router, iphone built in backdoor, etc. Pretty much anything
that would give the government access to the most intimate details of your
life. With the current political climate it's just going to get worst.

If you care about your privacy AND security, become informed and vote for
privacy advocates. Visit fightforthefuture.org and eff.org to learn more.

DISCLAIMER: I am in no way affiliated with either of these foundations or
their members.

[0]: [https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/5/17203806/china-chinese-
qin...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/5/17203806/china-chinese-qingdao-
police-shops-restaurants-government-wifi-routers)

[1]: [https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/](https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/)

------
mirimir
The best defense is being someone too uninteresting to bother. Once you're
interesting so some resourceful adversary, it's very hard to avoid devices
being hacked, and virtually impossible to determine if they've been hacked.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's effectively feasible to monitor everyone, and to make determinations of
interest after the fact.

So that's not a particularly viable option.

~~~
mirimir
Monitor, sure. But I don't believe that _anyone_ has enough resources to
backdoor everyone's machines.

~~~
dredmorbius
That depends where in the design, manufacture, and provisioning stage this
occurs, and by whom. It's quite possible Micah was looking at the wrong
signifiers.

(Difficult to prove, natch, but possible.)

~~~
mirimir
Sure, it's possible.

We know that the NSA intercepts machines for modification. And it's possible
that hardware is generally backdoored. Maybe even by Chinese manufacturers.

But what can one do, if everything is pwned? It's not practical to build
machines from transistors etc. There are dreams of open-source hardware. But
how could that even be done securely? The NSA can plant agents anywhere, in
theory.

~~~
dredmorbius
I wasn't addressing this. Only the first of your assumptions, that it is
somehow possible to escape surveillance.

I'm increasingly of the view that it's not, at least not through individual
action.

My interest is, for first strokes, painting an accurate picture of the
landscape. Which means discarding inaccurate models and frames.

Among those: that laying low is possible, or a positive (that's precisely the
objective of the Panopticon, and self-censorship abd -reegulation are the most
efficient), or that individual rather than collective action is appropriate.

It also seems that surveillance itself faces various realities and economies,
which can be directly attacked.

------
jpalomaki
A simple thing to make evil maids job harder is to just apply plenty of
instant glue. This way it takes much more effort to open the laptop or switch
components. Also fill in ports you don’t need.

For practical security it is also important to have some physical things on
the laptop body that allow you to identify your hardware. Otherwise somebody
will just replace it with their own hardware to collect your password.
Obviously pretty much anything can be replicated, but absolute security is
anyways impossible to achieve so you can only try to make things harder for
them.

------
mordant
. . . so, you either leave your laptop at home (assuming you've a sufficient
degree of certainty it won't be hacked there) or you keep it with you at all
times, with all wireless technologies disabled.

With regards to my checked luggage - no electronics there - when traveling
to/from/in the US, I always save those 'Inspected by TSA' placards, and place
one prominently atop my clothes prior to closing and locking my bag.

Based on various physical telltales I utilize, the success rate of placing a
used 'Inspected by TSA' placard in one's bag to deter searches is 100%, at
least in my experience.

Since I started doing this, I haven't received any new 'Inspected by TSA'
placards, either. So, that's another indicator of the technique's probable
success rate.

------
jonathonf
I thought it was impossible to prove a negative, generally?

~~~
gerdesj
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"_

~~~
rtkwe
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.

~~~
pitaj
It's proven:

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/15/british-
math...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/15/british-
mathematician-andrew-wiles-abel-prize-fermats-last-theorem-proof)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiles%27s_proof_of_Fermat%27s_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiles%27s_proof_of_Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem)

------
HIPisTheAnswer
> 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!

------
_bxg1
I could never work in security. I worry enough as it is, without it being my
job to worry.

------
tim333
I 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.

------
ianai
I wonder if it’s practical to make a laptop suitcase where all external edges
are touch sensitive? Have a serial number etched into each surface as well.

Edit-the case could have additional logic and wireless charging for power.

~~~
kortex
Just get one of those fancy metal attaché cases, attach a capacitive sensor to
it with some sort of ground plane inside the case, and wire it to some logging
microcontroller. Add a gyro chip to boot. Honestly the embedded gyro should be
enough, the MEMS chips in phones are CRAZY sensitive, and would easily detect
being shifted by a cm.

------
ComodoHacker
Hardware tampering is't performed on a mass scale. It's always a targeted
attack.

What the author actually forgot to do was to add some honey into the honeypot.
I.e. become an attractive target.

~~~
boomboomsubban
He's a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a position also
held by Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg. Additionally, he has helped
develop SecureDrop and various other tools to enable the anonymous spread of
information. Finally, he works for The Intercept, an organization that has a
history of receiving leaked information. Seems like a plausible target to me.

~~~
blueprint
But was there any specific thing during the course of his trial run that would
have enticed an attacker? And given the fact that a supposed attacker would
ostensibly be able to detect the existence of honey before the attack, would
they not also be able to detect the absence of it? (And perhaps its
simultaneous absence during the course of the trial)

Seems like an experimental bias to me

~~~
boomboomsubban
This is a journalistic experiment not a scientific experiment. Experimental
bias isn't a large concern, they're trying to record something happening not
prove something.

------
justinjlynn
If your security model relies exclusively on the integrity of information
processing systems, it's going to fail. Failure is only a function of how much
interest there is, and thus investment in, breaking that security. Therefore
any decent security model will rely heavily on non-technological methodologies
for preserving security compartmentation and protection of vital assets.

------
zw123456
I believe it might be possible to replace the HD firmware that will
effectively hide code, even in the HD firmware itself, that can only be
accessed via a backdoor. For all we know, it comes that way from the factory.
Just thinking, while we're being all paranoid here :)

------
giancarlostoro
I would think a fully encrypted OS partition would be harder to sneak a
backdoor into? Now infecting everything before the OS boots is outside my
scope of knowledge, but if you have your partition unencrypted it's definitely
much much easier to hijack your OS with physical access.

~~~
eat_veggies
Before your "real" encrypted partition boots, you must decrypt it, and the
system that decrypts it isn't encrypted itself, because you must run it
somehow.

On most Linux setups, that system is the initramfs--if you've ever installed
Arch or similar, this is what the `mkinitcpio` step generates--and if you peek
in your boot partition, it'll probably be named something like `initramfs-
linux.img`.

The initramfs is a (often gzip compressed) ramdisk image for a full-blown tiny
Linux system, complete with its own set of coreutils (if you want to see what
it contains, run `lsinitcpio -x` on it). It's what handles your boot process,
like setting up your keymaps, mounting disks, and of course, decrypting
encrypted partitions.

By unpacking, modifying, and repacking the initramfs, it's possible--even
trivial--to run whatever code you want as root, or intercept the user's
encryption password when they type it in to do the type of conventional
unencrypted backdooring you have in mind.

~~~
mirimir
True.

But after doing a standard LUKS install, you can move /boot to an SD card. You
can also backup the LUKS header to the SD card, and wipe it from the system.

Now the machine cannot be booted without the SD card. After restoring the LUKS
header. And even if an adversary creates a new /boot on the machine, you can
check for that, and nuke it before booting from the SD card.

If you're detained, you can just chew up the SD card and swallow it. Maybe a
little hard on the teeth, but hey.

But of course, that SD card must never leave your body. Except that you
probably want to hide copies somewhere. In case you lose it, or whatever.

~~~
PuffinBlue
So put malware in the BIOS itself, or one of the other chips or ROMs
available.

I think I remember reading a story recently about Thunderbolt or maybe USB
being connected to an Option ROM over PCIe (must have been Thunderbolt I
guess) that allowed an attacker to simply plug in a USB stick and permanently
and irrevocably pwn the system - right down to securing the flaw that allowed
flashing of the ROM over the PCIe connection. I think the malware overwrote
some bit that allowed any further writing, so even attaching physical chip
flashing device to the ROM wouldn't clear the malware. The machine was
effectively permanently compromised and could only be thrown away.

~~~
mirimir
Yes, it was Thunderbolt.[0] Firewire had the same issue. As does PCIe. But
maybe USB 2.0 can be secured. If so, just fill other ports with epoxy. And use
metal-flake nail polish to tamper protect seams. If USB isn't securable, give
up, I guess.

0)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383130](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383130)

~~~
georgebarnett
That’s the great thing about USB-C - If you epoxy the ports, you now can’t
charge.. _sigh_

~~~
mirimir
Maybe have multiple batteries, and use a dumb charger?

~~~
georgebarnett
My MacBook has only one port and a sealed battery compartment, which is not
helping :(

~~~
mirimir
Damn. So is USB-C securable?

~~~
georgebarnett
Sure! __*

 __*Probably not, going by history.

------
discordianfish
My Linux laptop is fully encrypted and I’ve signed and enrolled my own secure
boot keys. Just following best practices and now wondering where this leaves
me vulnerable. I think it should prevent tampering with the bootloader but not
sure about hdd/net Firmware etc.

~~~
rocqua
Get some physical tamper detection on opening the case. Something like the old
spy trick of 'leaving a hear on the door-handle'.

There are some nice tips here on spray glitter on a seal and nail-polishing
it, then taking a photo. That way, anyone that breaks the seal has to
reproduce the same glitter pattern.

------
drrty
Why would an attacker black bag a laptop containing a pre-owned vendor BIOS,
by the author's own suggestion? This exercise makes no sense.

------
drrty
Why would an attacker black bag a laptop with a pre-owned vendor BIOS, by the
author's own suggestion? This exercise makes no sense.

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thierryzoller
In other news : You can't prove a negative.

~~~
DoctorOetker
Here is a (wrong) statement:

* [the sum S of two even numbers A1 and A2] is an odd number

Here is its negation:

* [the sum S of two even numbers A1 and A2] is not an odd number

or alternatively:

* [the sum S of two even numbers A1 and A2] is an even number.

Let's "you can't prove the negative":

* A1 is even => there exists an integer a1 such that A1 = 2 _a1

_ A2 is even => there exists an integer a1 such that A2 = 2 _a2

_ by substitution the sum (A1+A2) = (2 _a1 + 2_ a2)

* by distributivity: (A1+A2)=2 _(a1+a2)

_ sum s of integers a1,a2 is an integer: a1 + a2 = s integer

* substitution (A1+A2)=2 _s with s integer

_ S=(A1+A2)=2 _s, hence S is even

_ an even number is not odd

* hence [the sum S of two even numbers A1 and A2] is not odd

We proved a theorem that was also a negation of a statement!!

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emmab
Why not put a bounty of bitcoins on your laptop? If it's large enough it
becomes worth taking even though that will alert you.

~~~
gerdesj
I think you are advocating something like putting a diamond ring on view
behind one of your house's windows.

If the ring gets stolen by someone breaking in via the window then you know it
has gone but you do not know whether the thief say changed the locks in some
way. Now they can come and go with impunity.

~~~
emmab
Well if you're really paranoid that's the point where you get a new laptop.

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lamby
True, but things like reproducible builds can help prevent your laptop then
being used to hack others.

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delinka
Can't prove a negative, after all...

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nautilus12
So guys laptop doesnt get hacked and he writes a story about how it could have
been hacked but probbably wasnt. Thats some CNN level stuff right there

~~~
VikingCoder
It's an article attempting to discuss how you would tell if your laptop had
been hacked.

If you find some media that rises to this level, please let me know about it,
because I thought it was excellent.

