Essentially, if you are more concerned with someone who steals your laptop having a can of CO2 in hand and a similar laptop with VERY specialized tools installed on it nearby...Well, I think you have much bigger problems at that point than worrying if the NSA sees that you do indeed enjoy the occasional anime porn and maybe you cheated a little on your taxes last year.

I'm talking about the "you're about to be pushed into a van when it rolls up next to you" variety.

These attacks are completely impractical against a moderately hardened linux laptop.

1) Shutdown your laptop after every use
2) Strip the heads of the screws over internal components (This should frustrate such an attacker long enough to let your memory fade)
3) Use an OpenPGP smartcard for crypto key storage (http://www.g10code.com/p-card.html)

Share and Enjoy

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 6:55 AM, Joshua Zeidner <jjzeidner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 11:34 PM, Ted Gould <ted@gould.cx> wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-02-21 at 15:48 -0700, Stephen P Rufle wrote:
>  > http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9876060-38.html?tag=nefd.lede
>  >
>  > In Linux would an effective counter to this type of attack be scrabbled
>  > the RAM on shutdown? I also am not sure if the people that steal laptops
>  > would have the skills to do what the researchers are doing.
>
>  No, because when shutting down there is no issue.  The concern here is
>  suspend and hibernate.  If you are very worried about security,
>  hibernate is probably not a great idea.  Suspend, unless you're keeping
>  something from the NSA I wouldn't worry too much.  It's kinda like GPG
>  keys over a couple thousand bits today, sure the NSA can probably crack
>  them if they wanted, but are YOU important enough to fill out all that
>  paperwork?
>

 looks like you're trying to prompt another telecom immunity discussion... :)

 - http://www.joshuazeidner.com/
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