Looks like one of their standard steps is to plug a “mouse jiggler” into the USB port.
That would be a good time to have USBKill (https://github.com/hephaest0s/usbkill) or its [your O/S here] equivalent running. Maybe an expanded version to monitor other available sensors, such as the power cord and accelerometer on a laptop. If you are really paranoid, hide computer-readable tilt switch in the case, too (or even in an exposed USB stick, if USBKill running).
To be activated when you enter 9 nines into a calculator, hit the “square root” key, then the “integer” key.
(Obscure 2010 reference, sorry)
Or how the contractor prices the change to the construction job they really don’t want to do. “Move that toilet to the other side of the bathroom, well we need to reroute some drain lines and supply lines, maybe redo some drywall and flooring. That’ll be $50,000”. Of course sometimes people will take your ridiculous price and you’re are stuck with doing the task. Should we pay $660 million to call their bluff?
edit: you’re for your (!)
Or use an accelerometer in the box that will shut down the machine if it is moved without prior authorization.
Could be attached to the SMBus. An Arduino as an I2C slave should do. With hard power shutdown as a backup ater a timeout if soft shutdown would fail.
Burning a disk takes a lot of energy. Such assembly runs a risk of burning the house down if mistriggered.
A tamper-detecting circuit with the disk key in RAM, that will erase the key if moved without authorization, if duress code is entered, or if wrong unlock code is entered n times, could work quite better.
A small pyro charge then can burn the little SMD chip, if you desire the visual/olfactory effects and make it evident to the adversary that they won’t get anything today.
As @shaddack states:
If you have an hour to burn, This DEF CON presentation covers it, plus some fun applications of shaped charges. (The oil well perforators are particularly fun.)
are you two still discussing about robot torture?
I don’t believe I was overly involved in that conversation, but the techniques could be applicable.
oh, sorry. I misremembered and thought you were more involved.
It seems to me like the DoD should be taken to court for willfully trying to prevent and block a freedom of information request. Really this sort of response is unacceptable. if the president asked for a full report on hotplugs on his desk by the end of the week you damn well better believe they could pull something together. They are being willing obstructionists by throwing the scope and price of this request into the range that they did, and that is criminal and contrary to the intent of the law.
What if we all took this approach? Well I would answer the police officer’s or court’s question, but there is the small matter of my million dollar a minute consulting fee.
“Why yes, IRS auditor, I do have all my receipts and account information. But I can’t furnish them to you without spending 18 months and charging you $900,000 to make sure they’re the right receipts and the right accounts.”
Who in their right mind is keeping incriminating data unencrypted? Not just full volume encryption, which is obviously defeated as long as the user is logged in, but individual file level encryption. If I had anything remotely sensitive that I didn’t want law enforcement (or the DoD!) to access, keeping my computer powered up and my user logged in and my screensaver inactive wouldn’t allow them to read it.
Of course there are ways around that too — keyloggers, Van Eck, probably more arcane methods I don’t even know about — but the Hotplug is only going to catch people who are so inattentive that they’d get caught regardless.
Planning on rooming with Snowden?
Just affix a jumper in the desk beneath the computer. If they pick it up, the jumper stays behind, breaking the power connection.
Or put the machine into a safe, with an end switch that cuts power on loosening the door.
If breaching from a side is a concern, vibration sensing or a positive pressure inside and monitoring its loss is an option.
An accelerometer/gyro that senses movement and change of orientation of the box can also do a lot of good.
I seem to recall that some industrial fabricators have GPS and inertial sensors that prevent the machine from being moved in a functional state., allegedly to comply with the Waasenaar Arangement. Might have been mentioned on boingboing once upon a time.
Yes, it was mentioned here.
And that’s why I would like the world where even the big machines are opensource enough, or possible to get retrofitted, that they can be user-modified, including removing crap like this.
Machining both nano and mega should be available to all, not just to those who are Approved by some council of self-important bureaucrats.
I actually discussed ways to actively compensate the machine frame vibrations and deformations so even lower-end machines can be highly accurate. Reportedly it was tried but then abandoned because it increased power consumption too much. But it may not be a problem in some other contexts, so I should ask more details…
Can neither confirm nor deny
Depends if the President happens to be one of those ‘Murican hatin’ Democrats! Seriously though, I wouldn’t put it past them to find creative ways out of obeying even the Executive Office of the President. Secret police don’t tend to make the most reliable public servants.
The DoD are secret police now?
