7 ms·
Make your electronics tamper-evident
- bdcravens 2y agoI had to disassemble our relatively new Roborock vacuum to clean it fully (it found a piece of dog waste and made a lovely mess). I removed every screw I could find and still couldn't remove the bottom cover. That's when I noticed what looked like a hole with a plastic filler, but was actually a bit of wax covering the final screw. I presume this was a simple way to determine if the device had been tampered, for warranty purposes.
- meowster 2y agoJust a friendly reminder for everyone: in the United States, companies cannot legally void your warranty for removing "warranty void if removed" stickers or similar (like wax seals). Companies can only void the warranty on specific items that you damage. As long as you don't damage anything when opening up electronics, ask them to put in writing why they are voiding your warranty (chances are they'll "help you just this one time" instead). The FTC is finally cracking down on companies that use such warnings. (Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act - same law that lets you or third parties do work on your vehicles without voiding the manufacturer warranty.)
- SoftTalker 2y agoI've seen those stickers on hard drives. I always assumed that maybe the internal mechanisms were in a vacuum or super-clean and opening the case would allow air or dust into the moving parts.
- meowster 2y ago> As long as you don't damage anything when opening up electronics Considering the nature of hard drives, I think that would fall under damage caused by opening. My understanding is that they are not in a vacuum, but they are super-clean. The air/gas inside is an important part by preventing the read/write head from touching the platters as they rotate. If a consumer opens it up, then dust is introduced which will cause problems.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoThe higher-end and larger drives today are filled with helium (or vacuum in some exotic cases), and opening the case at all completely destroys the drive's ability to operate.
- Qwertious 2y agoI'm pretty sure the helium-filled hard drives are incredibly difficult to seal, and IIRC are welded shut. I don't see how you'd open it in the first place without a dremel anyway.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoMost hard drives today are ultrasonically welded shut (metal to plastic) and hermetically sealed. The helium drives are not much harder to get into than normal hard drives today. The difference in processing is actually only a few steps where they insert the helium and then close the final hole.
- edweis 2y agoWait, so if I open my MacBook it is still under warranty ?
- cheeze 2y agoGives me memories of heating the tamper-evident sticker with a hairdryer to open up my xbox 360 so that I could flash DVD drive firmware so that I could load... backups as a child who couldn't afford games. That xbox took forever to save for, so voiding the warranty wasn't an option. Luckily, the ole hairdryer defeated the tamper evident destruction of the sticker. I love things like that. Microsoft pays for manufacturing of a security sticker to prevent tampering. On a device that runs a hypervisor (wild at the time) to prevent tampering. And some dude on the internet realizes that you can just heat it up with a hair dryer and carefully peel it back with tweezers, than flash firmware to your DVD drive that reports "yep, this is an official Xbox 360 disk" to the locked-down-and-totally-secure OS.
- wgrover 2y agoHere's some work I did a couple years ago using some of these principles to fight counterfeit medicines: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11234-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11234-4 A side note: I think there's an unmet need for algorithms that can convert photos of these random patterns into text (or something similar) that can be stored in a database and searched quickly for matching patterns. I've tried image similarity algorithms like the ones used by e.g. Google Reverse Image Search, but they seem poorly suited for this task. I ended up writing my own crude algorithm in the paper above that converts a pattern into a set of strings, and it works OK, but surely there are better ways to do this.
- twerkmonsta 2y agoVery cool! This seems almost like physical cryptography. Maybe there is a better term for it, but I’d be very interested in other work along these lines.
- wgrover 2y agoThanks! There are related structures in electronic circuits called physical unclonable functions (PUFs) that find uses in cryptography - you might find them interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_unclonable_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_unclonable_function
- gorgoiler 2y agoI once wondered if the colorful fibers in bank notes — which, like the nonpareil spheres, are distributed at random throughout the paper on which the notes a printed — can also be used to generate a unique number. Examples (aha, including a teaser to an upcoming product called “Verifibre”!) can be seen here: https://securityfibres.com/ https://securityfibres.com/ Instead of a lookup table, that number could be signed and the signature printed onto the bank note itself. It would be impractical to either deduce the signing key or duplicate the pattern of fibers in a way that the signature was still valid. I don’t know if there’s a signature algorithm though that is resilient to lossy and unreliable input data and which can also produce short enough output that could be printed on the face of a bank note.
- twerkmonsta 2y agoI would love to hear more about the kind of work done by people that need this level of security. Like is the NSA covering their laptop screws in glitter nail polish? Are covert CIA agents? SOF? Who needs this level of secrecy that would not have the physical security in place to protect the device in the first place?
- bediger4000 2y agoI bet some reporters, Bart Gellman, Ellen Nakashima, Jason Leopold, Kim Zetter maybe, do this kind of thing. Anna Merlan, Tim Marchman, those 404 Media folks probably. Reporting on crime syndicates probably leads you to be paranoid.
- dotancohen 2y agoIt seems that this might blow other types of cover, though. If the border guard notices glitter-covered screws on Ordinary Joe's laptop, that might tip off the Imperial Guards to keep a close eye on him during his stay.
- praptak 2y agoThat's why it is good to make general public aware of these techniques. The more people use it the better for the people who really need to use it.
- matheusmoreira 2y agoIf success requires getting people to care about anything at all we've already lost. Electronics should just come with tamper-evidence as a feature. They should come with these things pre-applied so that everyone has them whether they care or not. Then they can't single you out for having them.
- walterbell 2y agoSome HP PCs have tamper detection of cover removal, anchored in TPM and security coprocessor, http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c07055601.pdf http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c07055601.pdf
- amelius 2y agoThe problem with this technique is that now you have to inspect the seal every time you leave your laptop unattended.
- mr_mitm 2y agoI think that's quite obvious. You say that as if there were alternatives. Are there any other, more convenient techniques to defend against evil maid attacks?
- amelius 2y agoMake the BIOS run a checksum of all the hardware. Automatically clear some memory when the laptop is opened so the BIOS can tell. Put important parts inside an epoxy. Add some transformer wire in the epoxy that will break when somebody tries to tamper with it. I'm not trying to be exhaustive. But stuff like that.
- mr_mitm 2y agoYou cannot trust the BIOS after an evil maid attack. And there can be sniffers on the physical layer inside the laptop.
- walterbell 2y agoDRTM, SMM attestation and remote attestation have evil maid attacks in their threat model, with a firmware TPM or SoC enclave that isn't subject to mitm. Password keystroke surveillance (from sniffer, optical cameras or RF WiFi Sensing) can be mitigated by removable 2FA/smartcard. TEMPEST info leakage from displays, components or RF implants can be measured, as SDRs and machine learning lower decoding costs, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41116682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41116682 Some enterprise PCs can detect when the case cover is opened, e.g. http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c07055601.pdf http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c07055601.pdf
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- BadHumans 2y agoI have thought about this many times when thinking about the Framework Laptop. How easy it would be to swap one of the side ports with a malicious version that has something like a keylogger in it and you would never be the wiser.
- kadoban 2y agoTamper-proofing those should be relatively easy with the techniques in the page at least. The difference being that someone would have to copy the whole glitter pattern to a new casing, (or open up the existing one, so you'd have to make that evident too, I'm not sure how easy to open those actually are).
- gary_0 2y ago> If the police Not just the police: if your data or the data of the organization you work for is considered valuable enough[0], you also have to worry about thieves, foreign spies/saboteurs, corporate espionage, a wayward relative looking for banking passwords or Bitcoin to fund their drug/gambling habit, or a particularly obsessive ex. [0] Mine isn't, and paranoia isn't one of my vices, so this is all academic to me.
- immibis 2y agobut for most of us, it's the police (who are corrupt)
- lolinder 2y agoRealistically, for most of us on this forum it's not even the police. For most of us the police where we live aren't that corrupt (though it's par for the course of internet discourse to pretend there's one monolithic "the police"), and most of us statistically speaking aren't in the minority groups that get disproportionately targeted. If that isn't you—if police where you live and travel are corrupt or if you're a minority who gets disproportionate enforcement—then sure, it's the police.
- immibis 2y agoI live in Germany, where it's illegal to not support Israel, and police have raided the homes of non-Israel-supporters. It's not likely - it only happened a few times - but it's possible, and protecting yourself is only moderately paranoid.
- xyst 2y agoMy first exposure to “tamper evident” mechanisms was in an anime series called “Death Note”. https://youtube.com/watch?v=zZBR9iQ7DRA3D https://youtube.com/watch?v=zZBR9iQ7DRA3D The main character has a series of mechanisms (door latch height, paper in between door and wall, mechanical pencil lead in door hinge) One out of place tamper seal, can ignore. But all 3 broken? Someone was in the room. Personally used the paper trick when I was young and living with parents and siblings. Would easily know when somebody entered and trifled through my things. Also used that mechanical lead pencil trick with my “secret” drawer where I had created a false bottom lol.
- metadat 2y agoI was honestly surprised, that is pretty cool! Some creative ideas and very clearly explained and illustrated.
- fao_ 2y agoI've encountered the hair trick before, which is similar
- metadat 2y agoI was like "what's the hair security trick?", then proceeded to learn how tricky it is to Google for anything hair + security related, because it's flooded by wig securing techniques.. > Close your door and stick a single hair across the gap - so you will know if anyone went in.
- praptak 2y agoI wonder if the colourful lentils trick could be bypassed by a 3D printer that recreates the pattern. This seems in range for a state actor. Or maybe even a hobbyist with lots of time.
- cheeze 2y agoPresumably you can't 3d print a lentil though. Could do something like a robotic arm style of device which carefully places each color though.
- Animats 2y agoThere are DoD standards for this. Mostly for SECRET level. Containers for SECRET level material are supposed to be tamper-evident, but not extremely resistant to attack. Filing cabinets must have welded and painted joints, and good locks. It's possible to pry open a secure filing cabinet, but the damage will show. See page 5.3.1 of [1]. The U.S. Navy does authorize label-type seals but rates their security as "minimal". See page 6.3 of [2] Defense Counterintelligence Agency has some security seal guidelines.[3] Probably outdated. There are "tamper-evident seals with residue." If you remove them, it makes a visible mess. [4] They also have bar-coded serial numbers. A well-resourced attacker with a lot of access time and a preliminary run to get a look at the seals and have duplicates made could probably remove and replace those. If you're facing that level of threat you probably shouldn't have anything of interest in an unattended laptop. [1] https://www.nispom.org/NISPOMwithISLsMay2014.pdf https://www.nispom.org/NISPOMwithISLsMay2014.pdf [2] https://exwc.navfac.navy.mil/Portals/88/Documents/EXWC/DoD_Locks/PDFs/sealguid.pdf https://exwc.navfac.navy.mil/Portals/88/Documents/EXWC/DoD_L... [3] https://www.dcsa.mil/Portals/91/Documents/CTP/NAO/security_seals.pdf https://www.dcsa.mil/Portals/91/Documents/CTP/NAO/security_s... [4] https://seals.com/security-tape-labels/?_bc_fsnf=1&Classification=Tamper+Evident+Labels+With+Residue https://seals.com/security-tape-labels/?_bc_fsnf=1&Classific...
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoWhen the Americans secretly captured and dissembled a Soviet satellite, one of the night’s many challenges was replacing a plastic seal covering some part. The engine had been removed, “but its mounting brackets, as well as the fuel and oxidizer tanks, were still in place,” recalled Finer. That was when they hit a problem. The only way to see inside the machinery was to remove a four-way electrical outlet, but it was encased behind a plastic seal bearing a Soviet stamp. The team needed to leave the spacecraft exactly as they found it. But if the Soviets noticed a missing seal, the game would be up. Could they make a replacement in the middle of the night? … “My technicians were working all that night,” Zambernardi recalled. “That night we developed 280 photographs. We also had 60 samples of valves. We had samples of the fluid, rocketry fluid, or what have you.” As they put the assembly back together, the CIA car returned: inside was a perfect counterfeit Soviet seal. They could now reseal the panel and conceal their theft. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/28/1016867/lunik-cia-heist-steal-russian-satellite-space-us-ussr/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/28/1016867/lunik-ci...
- llsf 2y agoThis reminds me an old James Bond movie, with Sean Connery, where he picks one of his hair, licks his sticky fingers to seal his hotel room door. It later tells him that someone entered his room.
- ghaff 2y agoThat type of thing was pretty common in spy novels. No idea how common it was in practice.
- reaperducer 2y agoThat type of thing was pretty common in spy novels. No idea how common it was in practice. Depends on the author. Some authors are well-known for the thoroughness of their research. Some spy novels have been so accurate that ex-intelligence people have approached the authors to ask them how they knew certain things, and to offer them more information that would be useful for new manuscripts.
- hyperdimension 2y agoCan you give some examples of authors? I'm not a huge fan of fiction anymore really, but I think I'd enjoy a book that's decently "accurate" like that.
- walterbell 2y agoCameras continue to shrink in size and price. TEMPEST / Van Eck phreaking can be used to detect and locate hidden cameras, https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec24fall-prepub-357-zhang-qibo.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec24fall-prepub-357-zha... > For all spy cameras.. raw image.. encoding and compression.. takes place in an inbuilt read-write memory whose operations cause electromagnetic radiation (EMR).. Whenever the visual scene changes, bursts of video data processing.. aggravate the memory workload, bringing responsive EMR patterns. ESauron can detect spy cameras by intentionally stimulating scene changes and then sensing the surge of EMRs.. Experiments with 50 camera products show that ESauron can detect all spy cameras with an accuracy of 100% after only 4 stimuli, the detection range can exceed 20 meters even in the presence of blockages, and all spy cameras can be accurately located.
- Arrath 2y agoVery interesting read, thanks for the link!
- someplaceguy 2y agoThat's really cool! I wonder how soon I can buy one of these ESauron thingies.
- duggan 2y agoJust from the abstract it seems like this could be defeated by spy camera manufacturers by placing a Faraday cage around the camera components. It looks like they acknowledge that under Limitations: > The latest smartphones employ low-power DDR techniques [49][50] and integrate Faraday cages internally to mitigate electromagnetic radiation (EMR) leakage [51]. The combination of the two measures significantly increase difficulty to detect smart- phone cameras’ memory EMRs using the current ESauron prototype.
- walterbell 2y ago> smartphones.. integrate Faraday cages internally to mitigate.. EMR Conductive inks can shield specific components, https://www.idtechex.com/en/research-report/conductive-ink-markets-2019-2029-forecasts-technologies-players/665 https://www.idtechex.com/en/research-report/conductive-ink-m... Spray-on inks are targeting package-level EMI shielding.. Jetted inks are also being proposed for in-package EMI isolation between individual dies in a multi-die package especially for high-frequency devices. Some suppliers propose micron-sized, prioritising cost and maturity. Flat flakes offer higher conductivity if aligned well. Others develop nano or even particle-free inks, offering the thinnest solution.. Most offer a hybrid solution, siting somewhere between full nano to full micro and full spherical to full flake.. Some.. mechanisms to fine-tune layer thickness post-deposition to locally boost performance in EMI hotspots.
- throwaway93982 2y ago"As anarchists, we must defend ourselves against police and intelligence agencies that conduct targeted digital surveillance for the purposes of incrimination and network mapping." (https://www.anarsec.guide/recommendations/ https://www.anarsec.guide/recommendations/) I wonder who the anarchists are that are afraid of "incrimination and network mapping" and what it is they're doing them that makes them afraid of that
- nxobject 2y agoFor “anarchists”, read “Chinese/Russian dissidents”. How about that?
- coldtea 2y agoEven organizing a labor union to strike can get you targeted by cops or even killed in some countries...
- xcdzvyn 2y ago[dead]
- rocqua 2y agoThe point of anarchists is that states are evil. If they want to do something about that, that means the state should be undermined to free it's subjects. That means attacking the state apparatus, which usually sees a very strong response from the security services. In general one of the defining features of a state is a monopoly on legitimate violence. It stands to reason that challenging a state then involves violence, and sees violence used in retribution.
- tgv 2y agoIt's a big leap from thinking there shouldn't be states to undermining them through direct attacks; there aren't many of those, I think. But it is true that security services frequently overstep their boundaries, and that not all countries have proper guarantees during a judicial process, so even innocent anarchists may have something to fear.
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- BMc2020 2y agoCtrl F tamper tape amazon dot com tamper tape You can't open the case in a way that doesn't make it obvious it was opened.
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- meowster 2y agoTapes/stickers are relatively easy to bypass without being evident.
- cheeze 2y agoI'm sure we've come a long way since the Xbox 360, but I trivially defeated the tamper tape in mine with my moms hairdryer.
- PhilipRoman 2y agoI always wondered what prevents the "red team" from ordering the same tape from amazon and reapplying it in the end. I suppose you can sign it, but that has dubious security. Am I missing something?
- Karliss 2y agoThat's the exact reason why techniques based on hard to duplicate random patterns exist. Anyone can buy off the shelf tamper resistance seals, they mostly work against unsophisticated attacker. Better ones have a serial number, which mitigates this problem. Although you still have to trust the manufacturer (or different factory) will not produce a custom order with whatever serial numbers you want (especially in case of state level threats), or simply reusing serial numbers due to poor practices and simply not caring about effectivity of their security product, which as shown by physical lock manufacturers isn't rare. On more problem with off the shelf tamper seals is that attacker can buy analyze and practice bypassing/reapplying them. I guess you could also have the random pattern embedded within tamper seals thus giving better duplicate protection compared to serial number, not sure how much tamper seals have this feature.
- 2y ago
- jrexilius 2y agoIf this topic is a serious concern in your threat modeling, then this is a far better solution than glitter nail polish, and also doubles as a digital identity signature: https://dustidentity.com/ https://dustidentity.com/ I'm looking at using this for certain shipping and packaging needs.
- walterbell 2y agohttps://builtin.com/hardware/dust-identity-supply-chain-security https://builtin.com/hardware/dust-identity-supply-chain-secu... > A dust of nanoscale diamonds, blended with one of several possible polymers, is applied to a part or component. Thousands of randomly distributed crystals create a distinct fingerprint, which can’t be reverse-engineered or cloned.. identification is informed not only by the position of each crystal, but also the orientation of each crystal in relation to all the others.. number of possible distinct fingerprints: more than 10^230.. the dust comes from engineered, nitrogen-vacancy diamonds, in which some carbon atoms are replaced with nitrogen ones.. "The random nature of how [nanocrystals] fall, roll and tumble creates a fingerprint that is unique in the universe.”
- workfromspace 2y agohttps://archive.ph/sNJgw https://archive.ph/sNJgw (page hugged to death?)
- bankcust08385 2y agoYes. It's a good idea. However it's worth not also gaining a false sense of security vs. state actors who buy software and hardware exploits from shops like Zerodium generally don't always require intrusive physical access to implant malware or extract information, or who use the local carriers to do the dirty work for them.
- tiku 2y agoTamper proof screws, but do you check underneath your laptop every time you went away for a few minutes?
- folmar 2y agoIf you are paranoid/targeted you just normally don't leave it, just always take it with you.
- AshamedCaptain 2y agoI find that this has much more promise than all the crap about Secure Boot and the like for the far-fetched "evil maid" scenario. NO ONE I know is going to react to Windows going batshit and requesting the Bitlocker key for no reason as "my laptop has been tampered with!". Heck, given large enough number of employees, IT has to hand out the bitlocker keys almost every day due to how frequent false positives are. On the other hand, I'd think they'd pay attention to actual tampering evidence.
- aseipp 2y agoYeah, Secure Boot/Measured Boot is also needed to resist against persistent compromise in the virtual world, which is arguably much more problematic and has a much longer history of actual application in the wild. Chromebooks for example are designed so that even with a full system wide exploit that compromises the kernel, a reboot will return the system to a consistent and uncompromised state. (An interesting parallel is in the mobile ecosystem where things like untethered jailbreaks, i.e. persistent ones, for high end targets are nearly non-existent. Similarly, existing attacks from things like Cellebrite for high-end devices like Pixel/iPhones are generally classified in terms of things like whether they are vulnerable before or after first unlock of the device where boot chain security is strongest, and there's nearly nothing in terms of persistent compromise, downgrade/replay attacks, etc.)
- AshamedCaptain 2y agoMeasured Boot maybe, but Secure Boot is not for that -- e.g. if your attackers can compromise your running Windows system (or e.g. your $HOME in Linux) the attack surface for spyware they can leave without any reasonable person noticing is HUGE.
- _2nnf 2y agoHappy to see this, because this is how they (Law enforcement / intelligence agencies) do it nowadays. Many years ago law enforcement (french DCRI now called DGSI) illegally placed a keylogger on my laptop, they placed it when I bought it online from materiel.net and placed it before I took delivery of it. it is 100% certain in my mind. So never ever buy a laptop or hardware online if you think you might be exposed to this, buy it from a store. I was going to build a hardware keylogger for laptops just for fun and as a proof-of-concept to show how easily this could be done.
- teaearlgraycold 2y agoWhy do you think this was done to you?
- TacticalCoder 2y agoI don't know who GP is but I've got in my LinkedIn contact someone I personally met who was actually spied upon by the GCHQ (or was it GCHQ + NSA? You never really know in this cases). It was done to him simply because he's a famous belgian cryptographer. And we're talking about people who made frontpage of mainstream media newspaper: hardly the kind of publications that shall report all the various states' wrongdoings (typically they'll instead be complicit and try to cover up misdeeds). It's not as if these thing do not happen nor if as if there aren't persons of interests here on HN.
- _2nnf 2y agoI made a joke online that I had access to the e-mails from the ministry of justice and that I would publish all of them wikileaks style (This was back in the 2011s, 2012s era). I had indeed found a security issue but the e-mail stuff was a joke, but due to many other factors it was more than believable. They even came to arrest me a few month later, I am not making this stuff up! But the whole story is very crazy, I should write a complete blog post on it and what their shady techniques are.
- roastedpeacock 2y ago
- mrbigbob 2y agoI remember reading an article from MIT earlier this year where they deposited metallic particles into adhesive of an id tag and registered the unique dispertion of the metallic particles as a way to verify a genuine or fake product https://news.mit.edu/2024/tiny-tamper-proof-id-tag-can-authenticate-almost-anything-0218 https://news.mit.edu/2024/tiny-tamper-proof-id-tag-can-authe...