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Phones need to have two passwords; one that when you unlock it just has the built-in apps and a small selection of your emails/images that you don't mind other
by ejb999 5y ago
Phones need to have two passwords; one that when you unlock it just has the built-in apps and a small selection of your emails/images that you don't mind other people seeing.
Second password would actually unlock the entire phone and all files.
Truecrypt used to have this feature (when it was around). Only the second password would actually open the full encrypted storage - first password - which you could give under duress would only 'see' fake stuff that you put there; always thought that was a clever feature - never had a need to use it myself.
- olliej 5y agoIt seems like they would simply compel you to provide the true code. Presumably if you are sufficiently concerned your only option would be to erase your devices prior to crossing the border?
- voakbasda 5y agoI seem to recall that wiping your device is the current advice in some contexts. Restore from a backup after you arrive at your destination. Rinse and repeat on the way home.
- netizen-936824 5y agoBecause you think they won't install some sort of firmware for siphoning data? Just get a new device or leave your device at home
- voakbasda 5y agoIf this is the new status quo, then I am done traveling internationally. Unfortunately, I have to believe that such an action would pose a pretty big risk of exposing their operation. Not impossible and definitely a real risk for high value targets, but it is probably not a very probable threat for the average citizen.
- netizen-936824 5y agoThere are plenty of mitigations you can take, until they start requiring passwords to email and other SaaS at least
- hollerith 5y agoAm pretty sure that no one can install firmware on a modern iPhone except Apple.
- netizen-936824 5y agoNot that I use any apple hardware in the first place but I'm definitely not going to trust that assertion. Just buy a shitty burner
- olliej 5y agoApple details how the boot chain works in the platform security document. The early boot governed by an erase install is stripped all the way back to that. There is no “firmware” at that point, it’s literally a boot rom, and the only thing that can be installed from that point is an apple signed binary. If you don’t trust that assertion then there is no system you can trust, because at that point your threat model is people injecting malware at the fab.
- netizen-936824 5y agoHas Apple's platform security document been independently verified?
- olliej 5y agoThe best I can say is no one has found a place where they've lied, and I'm sure that at this point some jailbreaker would have published something. They certainly had no problem doing so with the iphone4 (I think?) era bootrom bug. On devices with a secure boot chain (Android verified boot on the better android devices), chromebook's secure boot (which a brief googling would imply is distinct from android's), or fuchsia's VX there is similarly an absence of independent audit. So the question is, do you think Google, Apple, etc are lying about how their secure systems work? If you do, then the same applies to any other piece of hardware with a secure boot chain as well. If you don't think they're lying, lets look at how a device reset works on apple hardware, to see how hard it would be to break device reset. To understand how device reset works, we need to understand how apple devices work (at least the modern ones: Axx, Mx, intel devices with a T2 coprocessor). On these systems all storage is encrypted by keys held in the secure component of the SoC/T2. This encryption is done in hardware, in the interface between the system and the nand. It is impossible for anything at any privilege level, or in any other part of the SoC to ever see the raw bits in the nand. "Erasing" the storage means resetting the storage keys. That's it. Because those keys are now gone it isn't possible for any malware (or anything at all) to have data persist across a reset. The only way it would be possible for anything to survive would be if a reset did not actually reset the encryption keys. Even if the bootrom did fail to reset the storage keys, it doesn't read anything from the nand (why would it?), so nothing in the nand can stop the next step: the bit where it loads the install image being pushed over the physical connection to your computer (this is the bit that the limera1n exploit hit). The bootrom verifies the signature of the install image (using keys also burned into the rom), and starts that. The first thing that does is create a new filesystem[s?], so even if the bootrom had a catastrophic bug that meant it hadn't reset the storage key, the OS installer has blown away the content of the storage. Basically, on an apple device, getting something to persist across a reset would almost certainly get you a golden pwnie :D If the device you're concerned about lacks a secure boot system, then yeah, I would not be surprised if someone did manage to make malware they could persist a full reset/format/reinstall. I'd be really impressed, but not surprised.