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>"On that day, a male and female agent started an argument in San Francisco's Glen Park public library, to get Ulbricht's attention. As soon as Ulbricht was dis

• shittyanalogy 12y ago
  Someone should invent a usb dongle that detects a nearby rfid chip that you keep on your keychain. As soon as that keychain is out of range, say 5 feet, the computer locks and encrypts itself. Integrate this into the computer and you wouldn't be able to tell who has one and who doesn't. Think you're being arrested with your computer open? Toss your keys.
  • knodi123 12y ago
    that's called "security through obscurity". and sometimes it works great! Well, the first time. Of course, just like the shoe bomber changed airport security forever, an rfid keyfob like you suggested becoming commonplace, would just lead to the cops immediately tazing and tackling you, and treating every single motion of your arms as an attempt to destroy evidence.
    • Pinatubo 12y ago
      Tazing or tackling would probably take him out of RFID range.
  • joezydeco 12y ago
    You could be grabbed by agents and held there in your chair while another agent starts working on your files. My idea would be more of a proximity sensor that not only does the RFID-walkaway thing, but also locks the machine up if anyone additional to yourself approaches the device.
  • chongli 12y ago
    It'd be easier to just have the machine lock itself and power down whenever anyone plugged in an unknown HID device. The FBI (and other agencies) use USB mouse jigglers to keep the screensaver from activating while they transport the machine back to their lab.
  • saganus 12y ago
    Toss your keys. But then the LEO agent sees this, and not only does he pick up the keys, he will then proceed to charge you with something for resisting arrest, or obstruction of justice or any of the myriad of ways they have to make your life a living hell. I think this would be similar to smoking pot in a moving car, then getting a police car to tell you to stop and then you throw the drugs out the window. I believe that's enough of a reason to charge you with all sorts of nasty stuff.
    • Pinatubo 12y ago
      Considering the alternative, I'd toss my keys.
    • MichaelGG 12y ago
      Yeah but when you "throw the drugs out the window" they don't disappear.
      • saganus 12y ago
        That's my point. If you have your laptop locked depending on whether they are close by or not, then throwing the key away will not help you. I was trying to say that it seems to me as an ineffective method. Just as ineffective as trying to argue with the police that since you don't have the drugs on you (because you just tossed them) you are not in trouble. The drugs don't disappear just as the keys won't, so the agents would just have to get the keys and unlock your laptop.
  • saganus 12y ago
    Toss your keys. But then the LEO agent sees this, and not only does he pick up the keys, he will then proceed to charge you with something for resisting arrest, or obstruction of justice or any of the myriad of ways they have to make your life a living hell. I think this would be similar to smoking pot in a moving car, then getting a police car to tell you to stop and then you throw the drugs out the window. I believe that's enough of a reason to charge you with all sorts of nasty stuff.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• byEngineer 12y ago
  how is it legal for the feds to steal private property?
  • nemo 12y ago
    They had a warrant. It wan't technically stealing since they were legally authorized by a judge to take the property in as evidence.
    • edwardshearan 12y ago
      So they can take stuff from you without your will if you have a warrant? Wow
    • byEngineer 12y ago
      So they don't have to show the warrant to the offender?
      • nemo 12y ago
        There's no legal requirement I know to show the warrant prior to seizure of material evidence based on a warrant. Do you know of any relevant case law that says otherwise?
        • byEngineer 12y ago
          Nope, just sincerely curious. They need to show the warrant to enter suspects house but don't need to do it when seizing suspects property in public space. That's what confused me.
          • voxic11 12y ago
            They don't need to show a warrant first in the case of no knock raids.
• jtbigwoo 12y ago
  I've worked with some pretty sensitive information at places where it's a matter of policy to lock your screen whenever you leave your desk. It's second nature for me to click the screen saver button every time I get up from my computer now. I'm a little surprised that someone as paranoid as Ulbricht didn't have the same sort of habit.
  • ryanong 12y ago
    I think it implied that he didn't even get up from his chair. I think it implied that they grabbed it when he looked away.
• MichaelGG 12y ago
  I tried a few weeks of living opsec to get a feel for how practical this stuff is. Really got into it, to the point of wearing disposable gloves to get sorta untraceable currency and looking into body armour and secured living arrangements. It's probably easy to get too paranoid, and perhaps those people never end up launching a successful Onion site. But just quickly, he should have compartmentalized. Zero need to have all that data decrypted while doing day-to-day admin. A throwaway machine with Tails or something would suffice for management. Then, add some physical security, such as smartcards with removal events set to destroy and then chain it to your neck. Or there's little dongles that do proximity detection. Then get some physical security so your RAM is never exposed. The commercial phreaking devices were said to have thermite, but something explosive might look too much like terrorism. I'm not sure it'd be out of the question to wire up a short-circuit to your RAM at single click, although that would look bad, versus something less obvious. But really, this is apparently only because he messed up his server security so badly. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been there in person in the first place, right? It's probably safe to assume that if you're being physically targeted, you're going to have a bad time living a normal life. If you have a bunker or something where you can definitively see all approaches and have many minutes in case of a raid, eh, maybe. But by that time, there's probably some sort of correlation information or real-world bug going on, right? If Ross had been super careful, eventually they'd just bug his every movement, word, etc. Get video or audio on his keyboard, even, right? So worrying about this is the barn door question after horses have left, it feels.
  • tptacek 12y ago
    You don't even need something like Tails. You just need encrypted disk images, and to keep them unmounted when you're not actively using them. This is a capability that is for instance built into Mac OS X.
    • MichaelGG 12y ago
      Well, just as a defense-in-depth, in case of a Firefox 0-day (or 90-day) or something, it'd minimize a leak, slightly? Edit: Oh, also, since compulsion to reveal keys might be an issue, it's better if there's nothing around. In the US it seems to be if the prosecution can convince a judge that they really did see evidence but you since re-encrypted. I wouldn't want to rely on a judge in that case. Although at this point one is probably cooked but still.
• tptacek 12y ago
  What you're really seeing here is the limitation of full disk encryption. I talked a little about this here (the article is really about cipher modes, though): http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/04/30/you-dont-want-xts/ http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/04/30/you-dont-want-xts/ The problem isn't "crypto". The problem is the extent to which full disk encryption overpromises and way, way underdelivers. It's easy to have a cryptosystem that is at least somewhat resilient to this threat. You just can't get it with a UX that "unlocks" your whole computer to use it, and then "locks" it again when it goes idle.
  • arca_vorago 12y ago
    The problem of evil maid attacks is at least trying to be addressed by the QubeOS team, and think it's an interesting concept. Otherwise, yes, FDE is only a part of what should be a holistic approach.
• patcon 12y ago
  https://twitter.com/patconnolly/status/517792555292164096 https://twitter.com/patconnolly/status/517792555292164096 grugq removed the PoC repo in prep for a product launch, but here's a fork of a project that's a partial solution: https://github.com/RagnarDanneskjold/darkmatter https://github.com/RagnarDanneskjold/darkmatter Basically, restart an full-disk encrypted device when loss of signal or drop in temperature occurs. Have something similar on your desktop. Wear a BLE Android watch, and make sure your devices restart when they get out of reach, or when put into a Faraday bag, or when dropped in liquid nitrogen :) Yeah, it's still possible to defeat, especially if someone knows your setup, but it's at least pretty damn close to foolproof. If you sense trouble, just run like hell and lose the signal
• splatsearch 12y ago
  or dont have a battery in your computer so it dies when they grab and run
• MrMrtn 12y ago
  This also reminds me a bit of http://xkcd.com/538/ http://xkcd.com/538/. Cryptography is only as strong as its weakest link. That link more often than not is the human factor.
• robrenaud 12y ago
  This is the easiest/most feasible defense I can think of. Use a laptop with a camera. Have the camera require that your face is in the picture to avoid activating the screen saver. My cell phone already does this, so it's got to be easier with a full powered laptop.
  • chrsstrm 12y ago
    I would imagine that if you were up to something like this, the laptop in question wouldn't be your daily driver. In which case you would likely want to physically disable inputs and sensors like cameras, mics, location hardware, etc. I seem to also recall once reading that it was good measure to use a laptop with a removable battery, having actually removed the battery and only being powered by your power cord. Or so I've heard.
  • jnazario 12y ago
    isn't facial recognition easily defeated with a picture of the person's face? that said i concur, the proliferation of built-in cameras should spur us to adopt biometrics such as facial recognition, but it's gotta be better than picking out a few points and doing a simple match like most CV facial recognition systems do. some sort of challenge-response maybe, like "wink your left eye" or "blow a kiss", anything that a simple, static picture couldn't defeat. but i concur on the larger paradigm - the hardware is common enough to force us to consider biometrics as commonplace.
    • cle 12y ago
      Maybe if Microsoft gets Kinect sensors into their laptops, this kind of facial recognition will be much harder to fake...
  • Kenji 12y ago
    That sounds like a huge hassle to be honest. My android phone had a feature that made the screen stay on as long as I was looking at it - it was a disaster. It just did not work properly. I ended up deactivating all that crap and just set the screen to never go off, unless I explicitly press the button.
• gatehouse 12y ago
  Up to now I had never considered the need for protection against a mid-keystroke attack. Ideally it would have to involve no unusual hardware or software, or you might as well just slap a "I'm a criminal" sticker on your forehead. Second, I can't see it working properly if you need to do something specific when you're being struck. Closest thing I can think of: - headphones must be plugged in to launch a certain program - if headphones are unplugged before program is closed, lock and begin wipe - don't, under any circumstances, let go of the headphones At this level of paranoia you probably also need interrogation training. Ideally you'd also have your sensitive stuff on a machine that is both hidden and protected, and only access it remotely. You want to be able to deny its existence to have any chance of withstanding a torture attack. Edit: iphone earbuds have a switch that you might be able to use in your hand/mouth as a deadman switch, but I can't see that being workable for more than a few seconds. Also, if you're in public, they could film your monitor... so that would need to be sanitized somehow as well.
  • anonbanker 12y ago
    Do I need to pay you royalties for implementing such a headphone-based security scheme in my device?
    • gatehouse 12y ago
      Not at all.
  • jqm 12y ago
    That sounds fine... until you turn your head and jerk your headphones out.
    • detaro 12y ago
      You have to evaluate the risk: how "expensive" are occasional miss-triggers compared to a failure to trigger when necessary, and where is the optimal balance? (the always/never problem)
  • bashinator 12y ago
• Jonovono 12y ago
  hmm. Do some computers have accelerometers? Maybe you could do something like if you are at a coffee shop or somewhere in public when your computer is picked up before you have that turned off it does the necessary security precautions. Not sure what/if any computers have one though, but you could probably build something via arduino or something.
  • DigitalBison 12y ago
    MacBooks used to have accelerometers that were used to detect sudden motion and park the hard disk head to prevent a head crash. But it looks like they've stopped including the accelerometers in more recent models with SSDs, since there's no equivalent need.
• jpgvm 12y ago
  Proximity sensor (bluetooth or something) + thermite on the disks. If you get further away from the machine than 5m or so when it's powered up it will melt everything. For extra kicks also wire up another detonator with a case ground wire or something, if the case is opened - it melts.
  • sanswork 12y ago
    Pretty sure they'd just charge you with attempted murder of a federal agent then x the numbers of agents in the area.
  • dredmorbius 12y ago
    No real need for thermite (and it's a tell). Flush crypto keys, activate screensaver, kill all active terminal sessions. If you want to get extra special: scramble the disk keys. Without those, data's good as toast. And that can happen a lot faster than a shred, wipe, or even dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1g Something to fry your memory might not hurt.
• oh_sigh 12y ago
  Have a lanyard around your wrist with the end plugged into a USB port. Set up a daemon that watches for that device to disconnect, and once it does, the computer powers off.
• Dylan16807 12y ago
  http://btprox.sourceforge.net/ http://btprox.sourceforge.net/
• woah 12y ago
  Some kind of lanyard?
• madaxe_again 12y ago
  Clearly we need laptops with kill-cords like outboard engines - operator steps away or device is removed from operator's vicinity, it shuts down.
  • nhaehnle 12y ago
    This shouldn't even be that difficult to rig together: Take a small USB key, combine with a wrist strap, and write a script to listen for USB key disconnects. As a bonus, if you want to get fancy, the encryption key itself (or a part of it) could be stored on the USB key.
• alasdair_ 12y ago
  The standard way is to check for your face every second using a webcam. If you go out of view, lock the machine.
• alasdair_ 12y ago
  The standard way is to check for your fave every second using a webcam. If you go out of view, lock the machine.