8 ms·

I care about audio so much more than video, and text/keys/etc captured from the machine even more. As long as my screen and keyboard are out of the frame of t

by rdl 11y ago

I care about audio so much more than video, and text/keys/etc captured from the machine even more. As long as my screen and keyboard are out of the frame of the camera, I don't really care about it getting RATed. At worst, you'll see me naked, or making angry/etc. faces at someone on irc or email. While embarrassing it would be less bad than most of what you could accomplish by stealing actual information. OTOH, carrying around a microphone connected to the Internet which can be remotely enabled at any time without leaving any real trace (battery use/network use is the only real sign, although even that could be covered up to a great degree -- there is probably a way to do either low-fidelity or infrequent audio pickup, maybe keyed on location and charger state, and on-device pre-processing) -- people do this all the time Mostly because there's no real alternative to carrying smartphone yet. Plus, of course, there's the fact that no modern desktop OS is particularly secure -- either you give up auto-updates and likely fall to bugs, or use auto-updates and are at risk to your OS vendor or anyone who can compel him. So sensors attached to it, as well as stuff processed on it, is also at risk. You can somewhat mitigate this through a large combination of other protections, but it's almost impossible for a single user single machine to solve that problem. I'd love a custom run of Dell Chromebook 13 or Lenovo Thinkpad 13 Chrome Edition with no built-in mic/camera, and an EPROM vs. EEPROM, and some special case features. Would be willing to commit to buy 10k units at ~$800/unit retail in 8-16GB x 32GB config.

shurcooL 11y ago
Did I understand what you said at the end correctly, are you willing to commit to buy 8 million dollars worth of laptops?
- rdl 11y ago
  Yes. (and then sell them, obviously, ideally for much more than $8mm)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - Drdrdrq 11y ago
    You think there is a market for 10k of those? </sceptic>
    - rdl 11y ago
      Not as random laptops, no.
      - Drdrdrq 11y ago
        If you see a market oppurtunity like this, I suggest you go for it. There are many companies which will make you a custom laptop for such a quantity. Good luck!
        vinceguidry 11y ago
        The problem is the brand specification. Nobody wants unbranded laptops.
        sbarre 11y ago
        I (anecdotally) disagree. I'd love to have a good-spec laptop that had no logos or branding on it.
        irixusr 11y ago
        Agreed. I love Apple's hardware (much more than their user interface), but I dislike being in public with a giant glowing half eaten apple.
        vinceguidry 11y ago
        It's not so much the logos or the branding, it's the build quality. I used to run Ubuntu on old ThinkPads, ditched it like an ugly girlfriend once I could afford a Macbook Pro. Old ThinkPads were a step up from commodity PC laptops, which were a step up from desktops. In a brief fit of FOSS zeal I bought a System76 Galago Pro, but the build quality was so inferior to a Macbook Pro that I relegated it to desktop duty. If I felt the need to move off of Apple hardware for whatever reason for my primary ride, it'd be back to a ThinkPad. Rdl specified Dell or Lenovo also for the reason that the supply chain for those two ecosystems are well-developed enough that providing customer support won't be a huge hassle.
  - robk 11y ago
    This is a perfect scenario to test the demand will kickstarter
- Roritharr 11y ago
  Thats what happens if you take your privacy seriously. You buy one-off Laptops that you can use like paper tissues.
brbsix 11y ago
That custom run you've described sounds like exactly the sort of "interesting" order I'd like to intercept and backdoor (as part of NSA's TAO or some other yet unnamed organization). Personally I'd prefer to buy off-the-shelf hardware and just snip the mic and camera.
- rdl 11y ago
  Yes, but there are solutions to this (cut-and-choose, published specs, etc.)
  - throwaway7767 11y ago
    > cut-and-choose So, OEM buys 10k units, chooses a few samples and tests them. Then he sends all the units on to his logistics warehouse to fulfill customer orders. The shipment from the testing facility to the warehouse is an interesting target now. Alternatively, the outgoing orders from that logistics warehouse. An induvidual customer buying one laptop is no closer to his goal of ensuring no outside party tampered with it. > published specs I'm curious how published specs help a regular user verify his laptop does not contain manufacturing backdoors. I've seen many suggestions for hardware integrity, but none of them enables the end user to verify that his hardware exactly matches with the published schematics/ASIC masks. They all simplify the problem description to only reach part of the way, requiring trust on part of the end user in all the later links in the chain. Or they just assume that the customer is buying 10k units - which does nothing to help individual end-users.
50CNT 11y ago
Some laptops already have physical switches for wireless connectivity, couldn't you just add one of those that cuts power to the onboard microphone and camera?
- mkl 11y ago
  Some Lenovo ThinkCentre all-in-one PCs have a physical sliding webcam cover, and you can see at a glance what position it's in. Microphones are harder to handle in such a low tech way, though.
  - Kliment 11y ago
    Shorting the two wires of the mic together with a low-value resistor will do what you want, or you can have a physical disconnect switch. It's very easy to modify a mic in this manner if desired. You can even have the switch built into the sliding webcam cover. On digital mics it's a bit more complex to mute without disabling, but the brute force solution is to disconnect their power line in the same manner. Then again, you now have to watch out for things like accelerometers in the board or hard disk which can reconstruct keypresses or act as a very low quality microphone.
    - mclovinit 11y ago
      That last point is interesting. Even with an RF detector, an accelerometer may act as a cheap room bug. Heck, if automobiles use them to detect when an airbag should be deployed, why not just use them as bugs in cars? Now I'm scaring myself.
      - userbinator 11y ago
        Heck, if automobiles use them to detect when an airbag should be deployed, why not just use them as bugs in cars? AFAIK the airbag accelerometers are designed to detect much larger accelerations than e.g. the ones in a smartphone, and are thus essentially completely insensitive to anything lesser than a huge impact -- spurious airbag inflation is one of the things the manufacturers really, really don't want to happen. Many of them are just mechanical switches actuated by a weight, with no active electronics (makes sense for such a safety device to be as simple as possible): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWSlwhYyOhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWSlwhYyOhI And even when not impacting anything, a car is not exactly a quiet and vibration-free environment either...
HappyTypist 11y ago
All smartphones now come with programmable low-power audio recognition DSPs for always-on "Hey Siri" and "Ok Google". So it's here.
- dforrestwilson1 11y ago
  A co worker is heading to Las Vegas next week and we chatted about it yesterday. My Facebook ads are now advertising Las Vegas night clubs.
  - danieldk 11y ago
    Or your coworker searched for or mentioned going to Las Vegas on Facebook and you are connected on Facebook as friends, by location on netblock.
    - krick 11y ago
      That's actually an interesting thing to test. If it's the speech recognition you think is suspicious, why not try to talk it into showing you something it didn't show you previously, without mentioning the thing via facebook and stuff? I'd even try it myself, but I don't have a facebook account, or any devices with "personal assistant" apps for that matter. For the obvious reasons.
    - randominion 11y ago
      No he's right, several apps listen in on your conversations for advertising purposes. Tons of similar stories can be found online. The FTC just made an announcement about SilverPush, an example of such software: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/03/ftc-issues-warning-letters-app-developers-using-silverpush-code https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/03/ftc-i...
SixSigma 11y ago
> Mostly because there's no real alternative to carrying smartphone yet. And yet somehow, I manage
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  Well, if you manage it by using feature phones, I have bad news for you... But if you do indeed manage to not carry a mobile phone at all, yep, you are safe.
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    I moved abroad in January and didn't have a SIM, and time went on and I didn't get a SIM and now, 5 months later, I never miss my phone. My contract expires in two weeks, I am not going to renew it.
    - tpallarino 11y ago
      Pretty inspiring to read, I want to throw my phone off a damn bridge most of the time.
      - SixSigma 11y ago
        I would never have thought I could either. I just leave it at home. I'm never far away from the internet for most of my life, the few hours without it are good.
krylon 11y ago
My mother used to be a police officer, and she once came back from a visit to the department of the interior in our federal state (of Germany) and told me about a room they had there (maybe several) for meeting where sensitive issues are discussed. What sets them apart - among other things, I guess - is that there are no phone lines, no network, and for meetings people are not allowed to bring telephones/smartphones, tablets, or computers of any kind. So, yes, the audio thing is something to worry about.
- aftbit 11y ago
  For the interested, the US intelligence services call these "SCIFs": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Information_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Inform...
  - rdl 11y ago
    The most amazing is: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/us/politics/obamas-portable-zone-of-secrecy-some-assembly-required.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/us/politics/obamas-portabl...
jimhefferon 11y ago
> no built-in mic/camera Most people would settle for a physical switch, that is, a switch in hardware.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Switch would be the best, as long as it is a physical switch that physically disconnects the whole module. Not the kind that is typical nowadays, that only reports its state to the firmware which then decides what to do.
zxcvcxz 11y ago
Why would you use Chrome if you're concerned about privacy?
witty_username 11y ago
You can just buy the laptop and disassemble and cut the wires to the webcam and microphone.
JabavuAdams 11y ago
How can you trust Dell or Lenovo, if you don't trust the FB I or NSA (or Chinese intelligence community)?
deftnerd 11y ago
I typically buy older Lenovo laptops that I can put LibreBoot on, an open-source BIOS replacement. Then I open it up and disconnect the speakers, microphone, and camera. When I close the laptop back up, I usually place tamper-resistant seals over several locations. For an OS, I run Whonix and have it configured so the system wipes the memory and shuts down immediately if anything foreign is attached or removed from USB. Since I don't use any eSata or Firewire devices, if those ports exist I epoxy over them. There are too many ways to dump memory with direct DMA access. If you were serious about a custom run of security-focused laptops, I think you would have a market for them. Dell and Lenovo just subcontract with manufacturers in China and it wouldn't be too difficult to contact one and give them the specs and do a custom run of laptops. Considering putting actual hardware switches for both the Wifi and Bluetooth. I would certainly buy one!
- lyle_nel 11y ago
  How do you do the shutdown on USB change? I would like to try that out. I would imagine, depending on how it is done, that the malicious usb device might get a few keystrokes in before the system is completely down.
  - foodstances 11y ago
    https://github.com/hephaest0s/usbkill https://github.com/hephaest0s/usbkill
- neurotech1 11y ago
  A friend does something similar with his laptops ThinkPad laptops for certain applications. He disconnects/removes the microphone, camera, bluetooth module and re-flashes the BIOS with a custom version. On some ThinkPad models, there is a chip associated with the LAN management engine (AMT) that should be disabled as well. This isn't the Management Engine controller itself, only has a power management role for AMT & WoL that cannot normally be disabled. My ThinkPad has a physical switch for Wifi and Bluetooth, although apparently that is only window dressing and can be bypassed with a BIOS setting (& configuration tool from Lenovo) What do you think of having a hardware firewall processor for the Wifi and Ethernet interfaces on security focused laptops?
CyberDildonics 11y ago
It is already possible to run a VM and get 95% of the normal performance with a processor with recent virtualization instructions. My next computer will be built with this specifically in mind. I think this is an important step to better computer security.
c22 11y ago
I removed the mic and speaker from my phone and now make calls using a bluetooth enabled headset that is usually turned off. This "hack" took about 15 minutes and is not too inconvenient for my lifestyle.

by rdl 11y ago

shurcooL 11y ago

Did I understand what you said at the end correctly, are you willing to commit to buy 8 million dollars worth of laptops?

rdl 11y ago
Yes. (and then sell them, obviously, ideally for much more than $8mm)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Drdrdrq 11y ago
  You think there is a market for 10k of those? </sceptic>
  - rdl 11y ago
    Not as random laptops, no.
    - Drdrdrq 11y ago
      If you see a market oppurtunity like this, I suggest you go for it. There are many companies which will make you a custom laptop for such a quantity. Good luck!
      - vinceguidry 11y ago
        The problem is the brand specification. Nobody wants unbranded laptops.
        sbarre 11y ago
        I (anecdotally) disagree. I'd love to have a good-spec laptop that had no logos or branding on it.
        irixusr 11y ago
        Agreed. I love Apple's hardware (much more than their user interface), but I dislike being in public with a giant glowing half eaten apple.
        vinceguidry 11y ago
        It's not so much the logos or the branding, it's the build quality. I used to run Ubuntu on old ThinkPads, ditched it like an ugly girlfriend once I could afford a Macbook Pro. Old ThinkPads were a step up from commodity PC laptops, which were a step up from desktops. In a brief fit of FOSS zeal I bought a System76 Galago Pro, but the build quality was so inferior to a Macbook Pro that I relegated it to desktop duty. If I felt the need to move off of Apple hardware for whatever reason for my primary ride, it'd be back to a ThinkPad. Rdl specified Dell or Lenovo also for the reason that the supply chain for those two ecosystems are well-developed enough that providing customer support won't be a huge hassle.
- robk 11y ago
  This is a perfect scenario to test the demand will kickstarter
Roritharr 11y ago
Thats what happens if you take your privacy seriously. You buy one-off Laptops that you can use like paper tissues.

brbsix 11y ago

That custom run you've described sounds like exactly the sort of "interesting" order I'd like to intercept and backdoor (as part of NSA's TAO or some other yet unnamed organization). Personally I'd prefer to buy off-the-shelf hardware and just snip the mic and camera.

rdl 11y ago
Yes, but there are solutions to this (cut-and-choose, published specs, etc.)
- throwaway7767 11y ago
  > cut-and-choose So, OEM buys 10k units, chooses a few samples and tests them. Then he sends all the units on to his logistics warehouse to fulfill customer orders. The shipment from the testing facility to the warehouse is an interesting target now. Alternatively, the outgoing orders from that logistics warehouse. An induvidual customer buying one laptop is no closer to his goal of ensuring no outside party tampered with it. > published specs I'm curious how published specs help a regular user verify his laptop does not contain manufacturing backdoors. I've seen many suggestions for hardware integrity, but none of them enables the end user to verify that his hardware exactly matches with the published schematics/ASIC masks. They all simplify the problem description to only reach part of the way, requiring trust on part of the end user in all the later links in the chain. Or they just assume that the customer is buying 10k units - which does nothing to help individual end-users.

50CNT 11y ago

Some laptops already have physical switches for wireless connectivity, couldn't you just add one of those that cuts power to the onboard microphone and camera?

mkl 11y ago
Some Lenovo ThinkCentre all-in-one PCs have a physical sliding webcam cover, and you can see at a glance what position it's in. Microphones are harder to handle in such a low tech way, though.
- Kliment 11y ago
  Shorting the two wires of the mic together with a low-value resistor will do what you want, or you can have a physical disconnect switch. It's very easy to modify a mic in this manner if desired. You can even have the switch built into the sliding webcam cover. On digital mics it's a bit more complex to mute without disabling, but the brute force solution is to disconnect their power line in the same manner. Then again, you now have to watch out for things like accelerometers in the board or hard disk which can reconstruct keypresses or act as a very low quality microphone.
  - mclovinit 11y ago
    That last point is interesting. Even with an RF detector, an accelerometer may act as a cheap room bug. Heck, if automobiles use them to detect when an airbag should be deployed, why not just use them as bugs in cars? Now I'm scaring myself.
    - userbinator 11y ago
      Heck, if automobiles use them to detect when an airbag should be deployed, why not just use them as bugs in cars? AFAIK the airbag accelerometers are designed to detect much larger accelerations than e.g. the ones in a smartphone, and are thus essentially completely insensitive to anything lesser than a huge impact -- spurious airbag inflation is one of the things the manufacturers really, really don't want to happen. Many of them are just mechanical switches actuated by a weight, with no active electronics (makes sense for such a safety device to be as simple as possible): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWSlwhYyOhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWSlwhYyOhI And even when not impacting anything, a car is not exactly a quiet and vibration-free environment either...

HappyTypist 11y ago

All smartphones now come with programmable low-power audio recognition DSPs for always-on "Hey Siri" and "Ok Google". So it's here.

dforrestwilson1 11y ago
A co worker is heading to Las Vegas next week and we chatted about it yesterday. My Facebook ads are now advertising Las Vegas night clubs.
- danieldk 11y ago
  Or your coworker searched for or mentioned going to Las Vegas on Facebook and you are connected on Facebook as friends, by location on netblock.
  - krick 11y ago
    That's actually an interesting thing to test. If it's the speech recognition you think is suspicious, why not try to talk it into showing you something it didn't show you previously, without mentioning the thing via facebook and stuff? I'd even try it myself, but I don't have a facebook account, or any devices with "personal assistant" apps for that matter. For the obvious reasons.
  - randominion 11y ago
    No he's right, several apps listen in on your conversations for advertising purposes. Tons of similar stories can be found online. The FTC just made an announcement about SilverPush, an example of such software: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/03/ftc-issues-warning-letters-app-developers-using-silverpush-code https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/03/ftc-i...

SixSigma 11y ago

> Mostly because there's no real alternative to carrying smartphone yet. And yet somehow, I manage

marcosdumay 11y ago
Well, if you manage it by using feature phones, I have bad news for you... But if you do indeed manage to not carry a mobile phone at all, yep, you are safe.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  I moved abroad in January and didn't have a SIM, and time went on and I didn't get a SIM and now, 5 months later, I never miss my phone. My contract expires in two weeks, I am not going to renew it.
  - tpallarino 11y ago
    Pretty inspiring to read, I want to throw my phone off a damn bridge most of the time.
    - SixSigma 11y ago
      I would never have thought I could either. I just leave it at home. I'm never far away from the internet for most of my life, the few hours without it are good.

krylon 11y ago

My mother used to be a police officer, and she once came back from a visit to the department of the interior in our federal state (of Germany) and told me about a room they had there (maybe several) for meeting where sensitive issues are discussed. What sets them apart - among other things, I guess - is that there are no phone lines, no network, and for meetings people are not allowed to bring telephones/smartphones, tablets, or computers of any kind. So, yes, the audio thing is something to worry about.

aftbit 11y ago
For the interested, the US intelligence services call these "SCIFs": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Information_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Inform...
- rdl 11y ago
  The most amazing is: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/us/politics/obamas-portable-zone-of-secrecy-some-assembly-required.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/us/politics/obamas-portabl...

jimhefferon 11y ago

> no built-in mic/camera Most people would settle for a physical switch, that is, a switch in hardware.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Switch would be the best, as long as it is a physical switch that physically disconnects the whole module. Not the kind that is typical nowadays, that only reports its state to the firmware which then decides what to do.

zxcvcxz 11y ago

Why would you use Chrome if you're concerned about privacy?

witty_username 11y ago

You can just buy the laptop and disassemble and cut the wires to the webcam and microphone.

JabavuAdams 11y ago

How can you trust Dell or Lenovo, if you don't trust the FB I or NSA (or Chinese intelligence community)?

deftnerd 11y ago

I typically buy older Lenovo laptops that I can put LibreBoot on, an open-source BIOS replacement. Then I open it up and disconnect the speakers, microphone, and camera. When I close the laptop back up, I usually place tamper-resistant seals over several locations. For an OS, I run Whonix and have it configured so the system wipes the memory and shuts down immediately if anything foreign is attached or removed from USB. Since I don't use any eSata or Firewire devices, if those ports exist I epoxy over them. There are too many ways to dump memory with direct DMA access. If you were serious about a custom run of security-focused laptops, I think you would have a market for them. Dell and Lenovo just subcontract with manufacturers in China and it wouldn't be too difficult to contact one and give them the specs and do a custom run of laptops. Considering putting actual hardware switches for both the Wifi and Bluetooth. I would certainly buy one!

lyle_nel 11y ago
How do you do the shutdown on USB change? I would like to try that out. I would imagine, depending on how it is done, that the malicious usb device might get a few keystrokes in before the system is completely down.
- foodstances 11y ago
  https://github.com/hephaest0s/usbkill https://github.com/hephaest0s/usbkill
neurotech1 11y ago
A friend does something similar with his laptops ThinkPad laptops for certain applications. He disconnects/removes the microphone, camera, bluetooth module and re-flashes the BIOS with a custom version. On some ThinkPad models, there is a chip associated with the LAN management engine (AMT) that should be disabled as well. This isn't the Management Engine controller itself, only has a power management role for AMT & WoL that cannot normally be disabled. My ThinkPad has a physical switch for Wifi and Bluetooth, although apparently that is only window dressing and can be bypassed with a BIOS setting (& configuration tool from Lenovo) What do you think of having a hardware firewall processor for the Wifi and Ethernet interfaces on security focused laptops?

CyberDildonics 11y ago

It is already possible to run a VM and get 95% of the normal performance with a processor with recent virtualization instructions. My next computer will be built with this specifically in mind. I think this is an important step to better computer security.

c22 11y ago

I removed the mic and speaker from my phone and now make calls using a bluetooth enabled headset that is usually turned off. This "hack" took about 15 minutes and is not too inconvenient for my lifestyle.