As a child I traveled on a diplomatic passport. Abusing it carries very severe consequences.

Stick to crypto.

“Evil Maid” Attacks on Encrypted Hard Drives

Earlier this month, Joanna Rutkowska implemented the “evil maid” attack
against TrueCrypt. The same kind of attack should work against any
whole-disk encryption, including PGP Disk and BitLocker. Basically, the
attack works like this:

Step 1: Attacker gains access to your shut-down computer and boots it
from a separate volume. The attacker writes a hacked bootloader onto
your system, then shuts it down.

Step 2: You boot your computer using the attacker’s hacked bootloader,
entering your encryption key. Once the disk is unlocked, the hacked
bootloader does its mischief. It might install malware to capture the
key and send it over the Internet somewhere, or store it in some
location on the disk to be retrieved later, or whatever.

You can see why it’s called the “evil maid” attack; a likely scenario is
that you leave your encrypted computer in your hotel room when you go
out to dinner, and the maid sneaks in and installs the hacked
bootloader. The same maid could even sneak back the next night and
erase any traces of her actions.

This attack exploits the same basic vulnerability as the “Cold Boot”
attack from last year, and the “Stoned Boot” attack from earlier this
year, and there’s no real defense to this sort of thing. As soon as you
give up physical control of your computer, all bets are off. From CRN:
“Similar hardware-based attacks were among the main reasons why
Symantec’s CTO Mark Bregman was recently advised by ‘three-letter
agencies in the US Government’ to use separate laptop and mobile device
when traveling to China, citing potential hardware-based compromise.”

PGP sums it up in their blog. “No security product on the market today
can protect you if the underlying computer has been compromised by
malware with root level administrative privileges. That said, there
exists well-understood common sense defenses against ‘Cold Boot,’
‘Stoned Boot.’ ‘Evil Maid,’ and many other attacks yet to be named and
publicized.”

The defenses are basically two-factor authentication: a token you don’t
leave in your hotel room for the maid to find and use. The maid could
still corrupt the machine, but it’s more work than just storing the
password for later use. Putting your data on a thumb drive and taking
it with you doesn’t work; when you return you’re plugging your thumb
into a corrupted machine.

The real defense here is trusted boot, something Trusted Computing is
supposed to enable. And the only way to get that is from Microsoft’s
BitLocker hard disk encryption, if your computer has a TPM module
version 1.2 or later.

In the meantime, people who encrypt their hard drives, or partitions on
their hard drives, have to realize that the encryption gives them less
protection than they probably believe. It protects against someone
confiscating or stealing their computer and then trying to get at the
data. It does not protect against an attacker who has access to your
computer over a period of time during which you use it, too.

Please contact me if you have further information

Cheers Simon

But it’s an intriguing, out-of-the-box idea for dealing with the airport security nazis. Hmm, I wonder if US diplomats would be exempt from the illegal warrantless searches at US airports. But knowing the federal govt, they’d probably want all your personal information, a retina scan, fingerprints, and a DNA sample first.

Also, thanks for the TrueCrypt recommendation, I’ll definately keep that in mind for the next time I travel overseas with my laptop.

Thank you!

thank you for your attention

Thanks

I am interested to get more informations about the diplomatic passports.

Best Regards,Andy

I’ve got to save up for that!