Protecting a Laptop From Sophisticated Attacks 169
mike_cardwell sends in a detailed writeup of how he went about protecting a Ubuntu laptop from attacks of varying levels of sophistication, covering disk encryption, defense against cold boot attacks, and even simple smash-and-grabs. (He also acknowledges that no defense is perfect, and the xkcd password extraction tool would still work.) Quoting:
"An attacker with access to the online machine could simply hard reboot the machine from a USB stick or CD containing msramdmp to grab a copy of the RAM. You could password protect the BIOS and disable booting from anything other than the hard drive, but that still doesn't protect you. An attacker could cool the RAM, remove it from the running machine, place it in a second machine and boot from that instead. The first defense I used against this attack is procedure based. I shut down the machine when it's not in use. My old Macbook was hardly ever shut down, and lived in suspend to RAM mode when not in use. The second defense I used is far more interesting. I use something called TRESOR. TRESOR is an implementation of AES as a cipher kernel module which stores the keys in the CPU debug registers, and which handles all of the crypto operations directly on the CPU, in a way which prevents the key from ever entering RAM. The laptop I purchased works perfectly with TRESOR as it contains a Core i5 processor which has the AES-NI instruction set."
And all of this effort will not protect you from (Score:3, Funny)
The real enemy, which is the alien space zebra vampires that are out to suck your blood.
Seriously, this much effort is excessive considering the value of what anybody in a normal situation should have on their laptop. If you have a genuine need for this, you should be on the level of the person carrying the Football, and as such, you would be better investing in the Secret Service equivalent.
Re:This just reminds me of... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Or for even better security... (Score:4, Funny)
Doesn't protect you from Murlocs or Aquaman.
Aquaman is out to get you, that's why he has been using his aquatic telepathy to convince you to throw your laptop overboard.
The concrete is to protect it from the pressure.
He's very cunning. You have to be with such a lame power.
Re:This just reminds me of... (Score:2, Funny)
wow (Score:2, Funny)
you must value your pron a whole lot more than i do.