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Must be 25 years ago now I was chatting with a family friend, my friends dad, and he told me roughly what it was that he does: "If I have physical access to yo
by mabbo 3y ago
Must be 25 years ago now I was chatting with a family friend, my friends dad, and he told me roughly what it was that he does:
"If I have physical access to your computer, I can probably get whatever data you have off of it". It was the first time I had even heard of computer security as a concept.
I don't know precisely what methods he was using back then (it was the 90s) but he was dead serious.
The point he made has become more and more true over time: Whoever can touch the machine, you presume they have better access than the admin.
- remh 3y ago25 years ago it would be very unlikely for your hard drive to be encrypted. So you could just take the hard drive and read it direct ly.
- fbdab103 3y agoI do not think that holds up today. While there do still exist a wide variety of unsecured vectors, those are closing rapidly. Look at any of the closed hardware platforms (Xbox, Playstation, iPhone, TPM, etc). People with strong desires to exfiltrate data are stymied.
- iudqnolq 3y agoIt's not that simple. Everything, even secure hardware, can have bugs. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/14/azimuth-san-bernardino-apple-iphone-fbi/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/14/azimuth...
- HWR_14 3y agoWhile people with strong desires are stymied, I wouldn't trust any of those systems against a motivated nation-state.
- fbdab103 3y agoWhile nothing is perfect, newer security models do have strong theoretical security guarantees (barring implementation problems). Significantly strong enough that it will certainly stop random guy-who-is-good-with-computers. Which is the actual threat model for 99.99% of the population. Nation states have significantly more and different attack options available (eg unencrypted cloud backups, rubber stamped warrants, and old-fashioned rubber-hose attacks).
- JohnFen 3y agoIt totally holds up today. The difference is that modern security measures make it much more expensive to do. The "natural law of security" -- If you can access it legally, you can access it illegally -- remains true.
- sacrosancty 3y ago[dead]
- megablast 3y agoHe was talking about taking out the hdd, obviously.
- andrewchambers 3y agoIt really just depends if people have full disk encryption or not and whether of not the machine was fully powered off afaik.