This Laptop Will Self-Destruct 106
call -151 writes: "Interesting article at wired about how
since 1997, 205 laptops have disappeared from the
British Defense Ministry most with classified info. Oops, left
my laptop on the bus...
So now the plan is to have ``a built-in electronic self-destruct
mechanism that erases a laptop's hard drive if the case is opened by force'' when the code is forgotten, as well as ''a tracking feature that allows a computer gone astray to call home." Maybe we'll see
some of this tech trickle down to other interesting uses ..." Maybe vigilante justice in the future will consist of LoJacked laptops allowed to be stolen, with the Semtex inside blown up via 802.11. Hey -- business method patent ...
I'm sure they already have this (Score:5)
Windows?
Self Destruct Features in HW (Score:3)
In retrospect I should have patented the idea. I could probably get some decent royalties from assorted intelligence agencies around the world.
If you're from one of aforementioned intelligence agencies, there are lots more ideas where that came from hint hint...
ThinkPad? (Score:1)
anyway... this just doesn't sound all that "new"...
"if" opened by force... (Score:1)
Or is the British government saying "All your tools are belong to us!" ??
A less dangerous method... (Score:1)
"if" opened by force... (Score:1)
Or is the British government saying "All your tools are belong to us!" ??
Quit giving them laptops! (Score:2)
205 laptops going missing (even if it is since 1997) is still a rather alarming number, considering their contents.
Maybe they should chain them to the owners.
Make them accountable.. (Score:1)
---
The Elite Intelligence Officers (Score:1)
Thieves have been blamed for some of the laptop losses, but the majority of the missing machines were simply mislaid by tipsy or distracted agents.
Kind of makes you wonder just how hard it is to get a job as an international spy. Maybe the really good spys are the ones who go to the bar, get some agent a few drinks, maybe with some GHB alongside, and then the next morning:
Wha'appened?
Why are you even taking the laptop with the bomb plans to the bar? Do they have weapons grade drink recipes on the same hard drive?
This might suck... (Score:5)
Rehab is for quitters...
Uh.. (Score:5)
They may want to consider attaching 15,000 handcuffs at 2 pounds apiece.
The tradition of Empire. (Score:3)
One of the main reasons for this is the historical tradition in Britain to rule over peoples and waves, since the days of William the Conqueror. The British have always had a caste system based on gearing the country to wage war, and to rule other countries. The British upper classes are bred to lead over others, even genetically speaking this can be seen - every president of America has been of stout Anglo Saxon extraction.
The result of all this is that the British can exert huge influence abroad, and even today the pax Britannica continues, through our proxies, the Americans, who inherited their ideals from us.
The shining light of Celtic inventiveness and Anglo Saxon ruling and liberty has meant that every corner of the globe has had the values of liberty and democracy enforced upon it. America would not exist were it not for the Mother country.
The secret services are trusted by the British people, as they are composed of boarding school, cricket playing chaps who have been steeped in playing 'the game' since childhood. This tradition is why Britain was aware of the Soviet threat before america, and managed to convince america to join us against the Soviets. Same with Hitler - the Americans were to scared, and thought he was no threat. But Britain nobly stood alone.
In this laptop, we see the traditions of Old England and Empire distilled to a pure essence : Trust noone, treat all fairly and always some first - tho' 'tis no shame to come second, something that our American children have perhaps forgotten.
--
missing laptop (Score:2)
Powerbook 5300 Hindenbook (Score:1)
Interesting idea. (Score:2)
And you could extend this to other items as well. Every retail shop could come equipped with one or several decoy items, so if the place gets ransacked, the thieves would either be trackable, or better yet, you could detonate the payload, either something destructive, or something the equivalant to a dyepack.
-Restil
Re:Kaboom! (Score:1)
This LapTop will..... (Score:1)
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
hmm (Score:1)
/. slow again (Score:1)
Blah.
And Dr. Wang Just lost a tape! (Score:1)
I think three state department computers have been lost in the last 5 years. That has been a terrific stink too. All over the news about a year ago.
If branch of the US government lost anything close to 205 laptops with secret information, there would be hell to pay.
(Goodbye karma) Maybe UK has much lower standards for security?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
i Spy (Score:2)
Hopefully the agents who are losing their laptops aren't doing anything super secretive, lord knows if they lose a typical laptop, imagine what could happen with some super secretive 2inch chip
Shit I could write them a script to do this after three failed attempts, and securely wipe their data beyond comprehension [antioffline.com]. What they should do is give those agents time off with a suspension, ultimately leading to being fired for incompetence and negligence.
Odd that an MI6 agent would be out bar hopping with her laptop. I know the UK is a bit more relaxed then we are out here in the US, however I still can't grasp losing a laptop, let alone going to a bar with a laptop that had gov secrets on it if I intended to get hammered.
Maybe their government should look into a biometrics fingerprint based system which wipes a laptop on a failed attempt.
By purchasing something like some super elite case, I'm sure those laptops which were stolen will be easier to target the next time around.
privacy for the masses [antioffline.com]
try rubber hose (Score:1)
The site is www.rubberhose.org for the goatse.cx fearing.
Re:The tradition of Empire. (Score:1)
Same with Hitler - the Americans were to scared, and thought he was no threat. But Britain nobly stood alone.
No doubt I'm asking for trouble here, but for every Churchill there's a Chamberlain.
Anyways, if you want to know more about the British elite's, read Rainbox Six by Tom Clancy. Clancy adores the Brits. Rainbow is a fiction based on the very laptop losers (believe me, they are quite impressive, really). Excellent insight into intelligence ops, and concurs with what 've read about Delta Force (the American counterpart to the British Special Air Services) from Charlie Beckwith.
Blah.. Malarky, All of it.. (Score:1)
Business Patent... (Score:1)
"a method whereby electronic devices have specially designed cavities that are packed with an explosive agent that can be triggered by a specially coded transmission or by a switch that is activated when it detects intrusive force."
All those goddamn cameras, and THIS? (Score:3)
We have cameras covering every square inch of Britain so that every individual can be tracked.
But we can't tell you where Agent 69 was last Tuesday when he lost his laptop.
And it's a good thing we've got these cameras to keep track of the IRA, or they'd set up us the bomb.
So we'll give each agent a small thermite bomb in a briefcase instead, and give 'em free roam of the city.
The fuck-up fairy must be workin' overtime.
What is the freaking obsession with laptops? (Score:3)
Besides this reason, laptops are fragile, expensive, and rarely contain many user servicable parts. Even if you were going to set up a system in a public environment, would you prefer your potential thief to be forced to lug around 40+ pounds of bulky equipment or be able to slide 4 pounds worth of equipment into a backpack and walk away?
-Restil
Re:I'm sure they already have this (Score:1)
---
MI5 becomes most wanted bombers in UK (Score:2)
Suddenly, the MI5 becomes a bigger bombing threat than the IRA.
it would make more sense.. (Score:2)
I think the techies just want an excuse to play with fire though...
Laptop Security (Score:1)
If I attached one of these [targus.com] to my laptop case, hacked it's alarm to a big electromagnet hooked to the drive, or something else appropriate, then the self destruct effect should be possible. All this from "consumer" parts. A proximity detector is also possible, but I just don't recall where to find one.
Encryption... (Score:3)
Re:The tradition of Empire. (Score:1)
Oh, please. I am of British heritage and this made me laugh out loud. Recall that England's noble stand of 1940-41 was made possible by England's pathetic capitulation [wwnorton.com] to Hitler just two years earlier. And Neville Chamberlain was a Rugby graduate, too.
--
Re:Quit giving them laptops! (Score:1)
A local high school that gave 3000 students laptops just reported that none were missing and 12 were damaged. These are just punk high school students. How is it that they can keep track of such things, but government officials can't! I mean as an excuse the students can say "my computer was stolen, so I don't have my homework!"
What the does the official say? "I am a huge jack-ass and left my computer on a bus."
hey stupid (Score:2)
What part of SECURELY WIPING did you miss out on dumb ass
British Intelligence (Score:1)
Can I vote this (Troll, +1)? (Score:1)
Use on-the fly encryption, fercrissakes! (Score:2)
Scramdisk, E4M, and PGPDisk all create 'virtual' mounted disks on your system, which act just as any normal disk. When you boot up, you run the software, 'mount' the virtual disk (it's a large file on your hard drive), and voila. You have a fully high-strength encrypted volume to use just like you would any other disk. Very, very easy. You can even install your apps there if you want.
The data itself is encrypted on the fly, and stored on fully encrypted form on the disk. Therefore, if the volume was unmounted (say, by rebooting), the data is totally unaccessible. If you just rely on your computer to kick into password-protected 'sleep' mode, or use a password-protected screen saver, you're pretty well covered - the only way you can really get by these things is by rebooting - which unmounts the encrypted disk. Abracadabra.
Everyone in business who travels with a laptop should be using software like this. Scramdisk is, in fact, free (Win98/ME, $20 for NT/2k), and open source! I believe E4M is free, as well (not sure about the source).
Take a look:
Scramdisk [clara.net]
E4M [e4m.net]
PGP [pgp.com]
Why this stuff isn't more universally used by laptop-travelers, especially government-secret or business-secret toters, is absolutely baffling. Hell, it's even easier to use than public-key encryption.
HebGb
Motion sensors & drive encryption (Score:3)
Basically what the manufacturer is working on (it's not available yet) is a motion sensor and alarm, tied in with some form of drive encryption. Move it far enough that it thinks it's being stolen (user-configurable parameters) and it bluescreens the system and won't restart without a 16-digit code; the drive contents are protected because they're encrypted using keys built into the motion sensor system.
This is far from optimal:
Still, at the moment there aren't a lot of other options out there either. I'd expect to see quite a few more products along similar lines cropping up in the next few years.
There are certainly more effective possibilities out there....
One possibility would be a combination of hardware-level drive encryption keys and this sort of motion-sensor setup to keep the system from being stolen while active. Keys would be read from a removable device (iButton- or USBKey-like) as part of the power-up process and would be kept in RAM. Removing the key device would trigger a hardware-level system lock (many notebooks have these already, completely independent of the OS) but the system could keep running. Because the system stays on, it remains easy to step away from it while leaving it well protected - requiring the key to be present for drive access would be much more troublesome, because it would mean either shutting down or hibernating the system or having the OS aware of the protection so disk activity could be prevented without the key. This could be done almost entirely independent of the OS, with a fairly simple interface to make configuration changes.
-- fencepost
Re:The tradition of Empire. (Score:2)
Same with Hitler - the Americans were to scared, and thought he was no threat. But Britain nobly stood alone.
I am sure France, Australia and New Zealand will take exception to this. Those three countries, along with Britain, declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. Incidentally, two days later the US declared neutrality and wouldn't join the war for over 2 years.
One of the main reasons for this is the historical tradition in Britain to rule over peoples and waves, since the days of William the Conqueror.
But wasn't William the Conqueror French? Hence the name "The Conqueror" - he conquered England. Surely a better were argument would be that, as one of the most invaded countries of Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia
Re:What is the freaking obsession with laptops? (Score:1)
Even if the information was important it would seem like they would have something like rubberhose crypto [rubberhose.org] for just such contingencies.
But, no let's not have reasonable classification procedures, or use ready made tools, let's spend money on more crap like Super Sekrit Briefcases . Love that groupthink.
You forgot... (Score:1)
B*TTY
KN*CKERS
KN*CKERS
and...
SEMPRINI
This post brought to you by Tony M. Nyphots Flying Riscue
--
He had come like a thief in the night,
dis-info (Score:1)
Re:The tradition of Empire. (Score:1)
Own up to your own faults. You can lose a laptop as easily as any other nationality.
Re:Motion sensors & drive encryption (Score:3)
ho-ly shit (Score:2)
sheesh. all our notebook employees run this, and we're not even... setting anyone up the bomb.
Re:I'm sure they already have this (Score:1)
Old News (Score:2)
--
I Know Where the Laptops Are! (Score:2)
A simpler solution (Score:1)
There is no proof there was classifed data (Score:1)
The other thing to note is the classification scheme has a class called "unclassfied" which means that the data doesn't contain anything sensitive but it is still classified in the scheme
That's kind of heavy (Score:2)
I'm sure handcuffs don't weigh that much. 900 grams, tops.
Re:The tradition of Empire. (Score:1)
An elegant troll. He gets the history right enough to fool the moderators who fell asleep during high school European History class, but is still wrong enough to be, well, wrong.
Fortunately for us, all you need to do is say the magic words Neville Chamberlain and this troll crumbles to dust.
Re:Use on-the fly encryption, fercrissakes! (Score:1)
Distributed.net's RC5 client = Laptop Lojack!!! (Score:3)
The client uploads and downloads blocks of possible keys to and from a central keyserver - and the "reported" blocks have your email address attached to them. So when the PC's/Laptops were stolen, they contacted Distributed.net, who went through the keyserver logs and found the IP address of the stolen computer. This information was turned over to authorities and the stolen computers were traced to the thieves and returned to their rightful owner(s). I am unaware of whether the distributed.net client(s) were CLI or GUI, or if they were running in "hidden mode". If in hidden mode they'd be invisible to the thief.
It's an interesting (and free) solution to finding stolen laptops... well... as long as the thief goes out onto the internet before wiping the hard drive.. but how many thieves are that saavy?
os/2 (Score:1)
bmelloyello@aol.com
Re:Self Destruct Features in HW (Score:2)
Long ago (10 years?) it was reported (rumored?) that the NSA (who have their own fabs) uses microcircuits encapsulated in packages that destroy the chip (chemically? thermochemically?) if any attempt is made to pop the lid to examine it.
Commercial fabs used to pot the chip in a material that could only be dissolved by acids that will also eat the device.
--Blair
Re:Self Destruct Features in HW (Score:3)
Re:Use on-the fly encryption, fercrissakes! (Score:1)
-----
Re:Self Destruct Features in HW (Score:1)
Re:A less dangerous method... (Score:1)
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=
Re:Self Destruct Features in HW (Score:3)
I remember, some 20 years ago, thinking about building a blue-box on a breadboard with springs under the chips, all secured with a lid. When you open the lid, to see what's in it, pop goes the chips and an investigator would be at a loss in determining the true purpose of the widget...
--
Re:The tradition of Empire. (Score:1)
Quite not. The britshit are totally decadent. And they are one of the most hated people on earth.
The britshit ruled other lands because they depleted the meager natural ressources on their puny island. They had no other choice but develop the skills, laws and institution that allowd them to rape, plunder and pillage the whole world.
Did you know that once, you used to be able to purchase a piracy license, hire a crew, and legally go on the high seas and plunder and pillage non-britshit ships?
Some pax! Just a heavy navy that went all over the place, and whenever a britshit merchant wasn't able to pillage and plunder to his content, they simply bombarded the shit out of the place that had the guts to say no to some britshit swindler.
And to meddle in European affairs by instillating wars between the countries to insure that no one would turn against the britshit. One will remember Neville Chamberlain's accommodation with Hitler, which allowed the latter fucker to plunder Europe unmolested until it was almost too late!
Anglo saxon "liberty" is only affordable to the richer, those who are able to afford armies (of lawyers or soldiers - some britshit croporations used to have their own private armies) to defend their own liberty, at the expense of others, of course (like Mc Donald's bludgeoning critics to death by suing them for slander).
Those boarding school cricket players are the epitome of britshit incompetence, as exemplified with the incompetent family-compact, which was unable to keep their empire at the end of the war. And the britshit appeased Hitler to the end, so talk about shitting in one's pants!!!
Come second to last as it comes to intelligence and smartness, indeed.
--
Re:Self Destruct Features in HW (Score:1)
One big problem (Score:1)
Kurdt
Re:The tradition of Empire. (Score:1)
The Secret Services have come under a lot of scrutiny following memoirs and a budget that has been rocketing despite the end of the Cold War. Read the papers. Despite a resurgence we're terrible at Cricket because it's not getting played very much any more- even in boarding schools it's usually third to Football and Rugby.
The British Government has a nasty habit of acquiescing to America, particularly when the Americans want to bomb someone. As a Nation we tend to follow where the EU or the USA leads.
Laptops belonging to MI5 have fuck all to do with British 'Old England' 'Empire' tradition beyond people getting drunk and looking foolish.
Re:hey stupid (Score:1)
The mechanism must be done in hardware.
Nope (Score:1)
For any decent passphrase, breaking it will be impossibly difficult. Sure, with an 'unlimited' amount of time, but no one has 10^20 years to do it.
This method is totally viable, and successful. Read up at alt.security.scramdisk .
Re:The tradition of Empire. (Score:1)
--
Encrypted drives (Score:3)
The following synthesis makes sense to me: Have the drive encrypted with a symetric-key cipher. Have the key stored in NVRAM or some equivalent. In normal operation, the encryption and decryption is handled transparently. either by software drivers, or (better yet) by the drive controller itself. Because no person needs to know the key, it can be truly random and long enough. To activate the self-destruct, simply erase the key. I don't know much about NVRAM, but I imagine that it is possible to "wipe" it sufficiently that the data can't be recovered. If not, this idea would have to be modified.
In the best-case scenario, all of this functionality is integrated into the drive controller, so that data is encrypted before it's sent to the disk, and decrypted before it's returned to the system bus. This makes life easier for everyone since the encrypted drive system looks just like a normal IDE (or SCSI) system from the outside. More importantly, it means that the key can be stored inside the controller card, and never needs to be made available to any other hardware or software. This minimizes the risk of key compromize, even by a malicious user.
The card would have to support an instruction (or physical connection) whereby it could be signalled to self-destruct. This could be activated by LoJack-style equipment, or what have you.
Once the key's truly erased, the contents of the drive become totally unusable.
Re:The tradition of Empire. (Score:1)
Re:That's kind of heavy (Score:2)
£2, not 2 lbs. (I suspect that handcuffs would cost more than a couple quid, though.)
Old Hat (Score:1)
Re:Motion sensors & drive encryption (Score:1)
Jaysyn
Re:Quit giving them laptops! (Score:1)
Actually, the point was that high school students can take care of equipment better than the employees of the British government.
The fact that porn or a term paper is not as important as classified material makes the case even stronger.
Re:One big problem (Score:1)
Dude, they're secret agents! They probably have flying motorcycles and stuff like that.
Planes? They dont need no stinkin' planes.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Destroying data is harder than you think... (Score:1)
Unfortunately, erasing data is harder than you think. There was an article on rootprompt sometime back (sadly, I only saved a text copy of the article, not the URL; the author is Dr. Peter Gutmann of the CS Department at the University of Auckland) which went into some detail on what you would have to do. It was a long article and had many technical details, but the one sentence summary is this: "you have to overwrite the entire drive at least 35 times with a special set of bit patterns". Think how long that would take on a 20G drive (what my own laptop has)! I doubt the battery would be up to it, even if they didn't detach it.
Store the primary key on an iButton (Score:2)
Then use the passphrase to negotiate with the iButton for the key onboard. Unless you can defeat the tamper-resistance, bang goes any hope of dictionary attacks on supercomputers; you have to try each passphrase against the iButton, and it will impose longer and longer delays between tries. A strong password protocol like SRP will prevent some attacks based on this system.
Now the security from your passphrase is vastly greater. The iButton is pretty dinky and can be kept on your keyring (the thing that has your house keys on it, not a PGP keyring); it's unlikely you'll leave it in the back of a taxi alongside the laptop.
Of course the primary key is a proper high-entropy key (100 bits or more) so there's no hope of a brute force attack.
Does that sound secure enough?
--
Re:ThinkPad? (Score:1)
Re:Self Destruct Features in HW (Score:2)
IBM (Score:3)
Their TravelStar (and DeskStar, too) hard drives support the use of a password. The system's BIOS has to support it, but if it does (like the Dell Latitude's, I think), the hard drive will not permit any read or write commands to data areas. There's a master password which can be set to override the user password, but if you control both, and forget both, the only way to get the hard drive back is to send it a special command which will cause it to erase the entire user-accessible data area, then unlock itself.
Don't bother trying to change the logic board, either -- the passwords and settings are stored on a non-externally-addressable area on the platter.
--
US inteligence could use this (Score:1)
If it was the US... (Score:1)
Daniel
Wrong way around the problem (Score:1)
Re:IBM (Score:2)
I don't know about TravelStar.
I can just hear it... (Score:1)
"All the usual refinements, laser cutter here, rocket launcher here, life-raft here,self-destruct mechanism here."
"Unfortunately, we've had to install Windows XP as an operating system, so you won't be able to use it as a computer."
-----------------
The idea has been around but.... (Score:1)
We all know that any computer can be cracked... It's just a question of time.
I like the idea of having a program that you must go through first. A password that only allows three incorrect entries. There's no way around this password mind you...
After three entries the computer starts to erase itself (format if you would..). The program will shove a file in the registry at the same time. This will ensure that even if the computer is shut off the HD will resume erasing when turned back on..
Or take it a step further, have all of that plus a secret battery in the computer / laptop that is constantly being recharged by the bigger battery. This secondary battery has just enough charge to allow the computer to format itself. That way in the event of a force opening and format if the culprit tries to turn off the computer to prevent the formatting, he/she/they can't.
Ba da bing ba da boom bye bye box.
Linuxrunner
Not a good idea (Score:1)
The blue screen of death will have to be renamed to "blow screen of death".
Re:All those goddamn cameras, and THIS? (Score:2)
We have cameras covering every square inch of Britain so that every individual can be tracked.
Actually, no. Cameras are rarely placed anywhere that doesn't have a fairly high risk of crime. In the center of the shopping district in a city yes, there may be cameras. But not in suburban housing areas, et cetera. That would be stupid.
But we can't tell you where Agent 69 was last Tuesday when he lost his laptop.
Unfortunately, most cameras are on the street, i.e. where a lot of street crime is committed, not in the back of taxis, or behind bars. In any case, the resources required to track any person using security cameras would be massive. Whenever they entered a covered area, there would be a risk of them not being picked up again. Have you ever tried to identify someone from a fuzzy, black-and-white security camera? It is sometimes difficult.
And it's a good thing we've got these cameras to keep track of the IRA, or they'd set up us the bomb.
Can't live with them, can't legally torture them to death...
So we'll give each agent a small thermite bomb in a briefcase instead, and give 'em free roam of the city.
If we look at the article:
the Defense Ministry plans to outfit their absent-minded workers with secret-agent-style briefcases that protect national secrets by automatically destroying the contents of lost laptops' hard drives.
I very much doubt Thermite would be involved. Why not just make a thin iron lining for the briefcase, then take it out and wrap a thin wire around it, say, 10,000 times, then connect it to some capacitors and a battery inside? If you open the case without entering the code, the (ready-charged, of course) capacitors burst-discharge, like a camera flash, into the wire coil with the iron center, and the laptop in it. As those of you who were awake in first year high school physics may have guessed, you have a big electromagnet, with your computer inside is, recieving a big burst of voltage. This would generate a substantial magnetic field. Since hard disks are written to magnetically, Bang! All the data is erased.
That would be far safer and similarly effective.
But why they don't just encrypt the hard disks is beyond me.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
NIST's FIPS standard (Score:1)
Re:Self Destruct Features in HW (Score:2)
If someone hacks your computer, the worst thing that could happen is you'd lose some data and have to do a fresh install of everything. If you put fucking thermite in a PC, you're out $2000 worth of hardware.
If we look at the original post (emphasis mine):
about a year ago I suggested wiring the embedded device we were working on with thermite so that if one of those wise-ass kids in Sweden tried to hack our hardware, it'd quitely fry the motherboard and hard drive.
An embedded device isn't a desktop computer or a server. It's a proessor that's 'embedded' in another device. Take a TiVo [tivo.com] for instance. It is an embedded device. The original poster's usage of the term 'hack' was not as in crack [tuxedo.org] but as in 'classic' hacking [tuxedo.org].
The definition is important. If I was to crack a server, I would be breaking in and acessing data without authorisation. If I were to hack an embedded device, I could for example add more recording time to my TiVo [outflux.net].
Some companies are annoyed by peope hacking thier embedded hardware, since they can but low-spec versions and make them into high-spec versions.
The original poster was likely making a joke. He proposed a device that if you opened the case to upgrade it, would destroy itself.
It's funny. Laugh.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
Re:Blah.. Malarky, All of it.. (Score:1)
Bond: Yesh, Q.
That's Right (Score:2)
No, that's not as secure. (Score:2)
So the point of the primary key and tamper-resistant hardware approach is that the attacker no longer has the option of trying passphrases on their supercomputer. With what I'm suggesting, the only way to try a passphrase is to try and use it to log into the iButton. The iButton gets to decide how often you can try in a given time period, and for how long it'll lock you out if those attempts fail. That's vastly more secure.
Also, you now need two things to break in: the passphrase and the bit of hardware. Even if they've used "password" as their password, stealing the laptop still isn't enough; and you're much less likely to leave the iButton lying around anywhere.
Obviously the passphrase will be hashed as part of the key stretching protocol, and obviously you design things so that even if you can break the tamper-resistance you still have to brute-force the passphrase, but the iButton adds a very significant extra hurdle that could really make the difference for security.
--
Re:Quit giving them laptops! (Score:1)
Right from the article. Which word do you see more, lost or stolen? Do you get off on writing inane shit when you haven't read the fucking article?
It's much simpler than that. (Score:2)
In practice, it's tough to put the drive encryption on the disk controller, especially for laptops where the controller's integrated into the motherboard. (Most desktops also integrate it, but you can still run a separate controller board.) Either put it in the disk drivers (so you're writing encrypted blocks to the disk, but not changing the file system code), or else put it in the file system code (which has different limitations, but is much more friendly about keeping encrypted and unencrypted partitions, e.g.
Keys way too short (Score:2)
Encryption drives uncommon because of export laws. (Score:2)
Fundamentally, this is a case of governments shooting themselves in the foot with anti-encryption policies.* While there are encrypting file systems available, including commercial and freeware, they're not universal, hardware support for encryption and encrypted disk drives aren't universal, and lots of products are dumbed down to 40-bit or 56-bit crypto because of US export laws and those of other countries which the US talked into adopting. Many of the policies had the pretense, or sometimes the serious motivation, of keeping Commies from getting crypto, because we all know that Commies can't read math books and write software using them, but in large part they were supported and promoted by civilian wiretapping enthusiasts like the US FBI and the UK Home Secretary, who want to be able to keep track of everything their subjects** do, say, write, read, or look at. Instead, they're endangering the security of their military secrets, making it more likely that Commies and Terrorists can get them from stolen laptops and other unencrypted and underencrypted sources like GSM cell phones.
* OK, it's partly the US government helping the UK government get shot in the foot, but Louie The Freeh and Mr Jack Straw really deserve each other...
* Yes, US Citizens aren't technically subjects, and UK people are subjects of the Queen, not the Home Office, but that's not how the internal police forces *feel* about them....
Re:Quit giving them laptops! (Score:1)
1) In the UK, the lappys were still government property, and the easiest way to make them personal property is to "loose" them.
2) while the students were "given" the laptops; why "loose" something you don't haveto give back.
I've seen this type of loss a lot in corporate america, why should the UK be any different.
btw - when lappys get too old/slow, their owners get very clumsy.."I was working on my balcony and the damn thing dropped 30 feet onto the concrete", returning the pieces in a plastic WallMart bag.
Re:Encryption... (Score:1)
Steven