This reminded me of the (real life) story of Oleg Gordievsky, the FSB officer who was a double agent for the west[1]. He was alerted to the fact that the FSB were on to him and had been in his apartment because there were three locks on his front door but he never locked one of them as he didn’t have the key. He came home one day to find all three were locked.<p>[1] read “The spy and the traitor” by Ben Mackintyre. It’s incredibly gripping and at times hard to believe the courage and perseverance of the people involved but it was real.
And if that tickles your fancy, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" [0] is an excellent miniseries from 1979 about a mole in MI6, perhaps the best spy series ever made. I didn't care about the movie much, so don't let this deter you, but Alec Guiness as George Smiley is a perfect match. John Le Carré thought so, too.<p>Oh and Patrick Steward plays "Karla" the soviet mastermind in this series and its successor "Smiley's People". Just a few seconds, but very memorable, its incredible really.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080297/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080297/</a>
The author did an excellent job explaining what an evil maid attack is, but a very poor job of explaining how their proposal mitigates such attack.<p>I think the classic "Detecting unauthorized physical access with beans, lentils and colored rice" [0] approach is simpler to understand and simpler to implement. It doesn't rely on any hardware, such as a Raspberry Pi or otherwise technology which can be more easily subject to scrutiny via Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust".<p>[0] <a href="https://dys2p.com/en/2021-12-tamper-evident-protection.html" rel="nofollow">https://dys2p.com/en/2021-12-tamper-evident-protection.html</a>
That's cool. I hadn't heard of that, before. I had a related idea for achieving plausible deniability of the key in full disk encryption or similar scenarios. The password would be derived from the position of sensitive, yet innocuous, elements on the device, ensuring that the seizure of the device would likely corrupt this relationship. For instance, a series of N-sided dice could be placed in specific positions on top of the device (in the case of a desktop computer, perhaps), and the password derived from their sequence. Consideration must also be given to the possibility of the device being photographed—likely from a single angle—before being moved. So, the dice would be positioned to include some amount of occlusion. Any dice-based algorithm would need to ensure the search space for the resulting key was sufficiently large.
With beans and colored rice, a smart evil maid will just wait until they next earthquake to compromise your devices.
Just so you know, this name is already taken by a famous security product for intrusion detection.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripwire_(company)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripwire_(company)</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Tripwire" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Tripwire</a>
Agreed, it's pointlessly confusing to call it tripwire.
as well as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripwire" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripwire</a> ;)
I guess this is actually not an anti evil maid defense.<p>It's rather an anti evil maid tool, or an evil maid defense. :)<p>sorry for being pedantic, but with the arms race within cybersecurity, "anti something defense" sounds like double negation to me.
For a second I thought Tripwire, Inc.[0] had risen from the dead with a new IDS.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripwire_(company)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripwire_(company)</a>
> NEVER PLUG/UNPLUG THE CAMERA MODULE, THE PIR SENSOR, OR WIRES WHEN THE RPi IS POWERED ON!!!<p>Why?! Will it will trigger W.O.P.R. and start attempting to brute force missile silo keys?
The bullet point stating that tripwire was built for "High-ranking officials in businesses/organizations" should be removed, because that group is very unlike the "Developers of critical software", "Investigative journalists", and "Attorneys with high-profile clients" which are also mentioned.<p>Everybody who had the pleasure to work with "high-ranking officials in businesses/organizations" knows that this group is the one who overrides many technically optimal decisions and thinks internal policies do not apply to them. Their lives are not affected if a device is compromised because they are financially stable and can just blame an intrusion on the IT team.
For high sec people, they should have an internal sec camera system. They are have come down in price over time
I’ve slowly been working on building a Honeywell burglar alarm panel (a Vista15P/20P) into part of a Pelican case for travel. I can just stick up sensors where I need them temporarily (a PIR, a glassbreak, a couple motions), and then use an ECP bus decoder (like the old AlarmDecoder board[1]) to kick notifications and alerts out where they need to go with an LTE-connected miniPC/Pi.<p>When I need to secure an area (eg, vending at a convention at a hotel, locking up the room with stock), I can just pop down the Pelican, plug in the keypad (which doubles as the RF transceiver), stick up sensors, and I’m off to the races.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.alarmdecoder.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.alarmdecoder.com/</a>
How does an evil maid get past a locked iPhone or laptop? It’s really not that easy with a proper password and encryption right?
How does an evil maid get past a locked iPhone or laptop? It’s really not that easy with a proper password right?
This isnt a tripwire. This is a canary. You have to actively check a canary. A tripwire would send notifications in real time without the user needing to check.<p>An evolution of this would be to put a server on a different network, a remote location, and have it pump out warnings the moment movement was detected and/or contact with the "tripwire" system was lost.<p>But the best way of preventing evil maid attacks remains knowing your hardware. Anyone trying to swap out my laptop, or open it, is going to have a problem replicating my scratch marks, my non-standard OS boot screen, or prying out the glue holding in the ram modules (to prevent cold boot attacks).
> A tripwire would send notifications in real time without the user needing to check.<p>c.f.<p>> > If any motion is detected by RPi's camera module or motion sensor, the server will delete those secrets immediately, in addition to sending push notifications to the web client.<p>It sends notifications in real time <i>and</i> tries to stay irrevocably tripped.
I was sure I'd made a comment like this before, but I'd love some sort of home-spun setup like this: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465687">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465687</a> ...hood, tuck, john. (2x local, 1x remote) which constantly rotated roles as to who was primary/secondary.<p>Basically core "chaos-infra" for your home setup(s). Hood/Tuck switch between primary and secondary, always trying to stay in touch with "John" (offsite), maybe like a primitive etcd for home automation/monitoring/backup/file-serving. Green==3good, Yellow=degraded[local|remote], Red=single-point-of-failure, Black=off/not-serving.<p>Other funsie to think about is getting a thumbprint/PIN-locked USB-drive to hold/unlock `~/.passwordstore/*.gpg` so that even on power-outage/reboot you'd need to physically "re-auth" to unlock important secrets.<p>Something like this would fit nicely into this (imaginary) setup!
I had a professor once ask about the strip of duct tape across the back of my brand new laptop. "Well, thieves cannot pawn electronics with cracked cases. So all my laptops have at least some tape so they think it may be cracked." The next lecture, the prof had a strip of masking tape on his laptop too.<p>But slap a tux logo and an "i l9ve truecrypt" banner on you device and nobody short of the NSA would even attempt a maid attack.
>Well, thieves cannot pawn electronics with cracked cases<p>Can't, or they'll get less money? I'm also not sure if I ever saw a laptop with a cracked case before, not to mention macbooks are the most recognizable and can't have cracked cases (because they're aluminum), and other laptops aren't worth stealing because their value drops sharply.<p>>But slap a tux logo and an "i l9ve truecrypt" banner on you device and nobody short of the NSA would even attempt a maid attack.<p>truecrypt is actually very susceptible to evil maid attacks because it doesn't use secureboot/tpm, which means all a baddie has to do is installed a backdoored version of truecrypt and wait for you to enter the password.
new CPUs have built in memory encryption with random key. activate it for an additional layer on top of your glue<p>it's called TSME on AMD