On Sun, May 14, 2006 at 08:20:07AM +0100, Richard Brooklyn wrote:

On Sat, 2006-05-13 at 19:54 +0100, Adam Bower wrote:

...

Does your laptop not have ide disk password support?, this can effectively lock an ide disk until you supply the correct password.

Yeah, it has this... but getting around that would be pretty easy I would think. It's like unlocking a mobile phone, it's trivial for the people who know how (and there are plenty of people who know how). Same with a BIOS password. With encryption, the data itself would be much safer.

No, it's far more secure than unlocking a mobile phone. To unlock a locked disk you need to /really/ know what you're doing and there aren't that many people who are capable of doing it. The support is built into the disk and the passwords are saved on the physical disk, and you can't bypass it as when the disk spins up it reads the password protected area and won't do anything else until you supply the password. Even swapping the platters into a new disk won't work as it'll start up see the disk is locked and ignore you until you supply a password.

I'm not using it as my only line of defence, this will stop 99.99% of your common theives and give you a much greater chance of getting the laptop back. If you rely on encryption at the OS level then your stolen laptop will have it's disk wiped and a pirate copy of Windows XP installed on it and be resold within days.

The whole point of this system is that it will cost the thief money to go and buy a new hard disk and then dismantle the machine to reset the bios (and it is very unlikely he will have this knowledge), more likely he will end up selling it to a mate for a fiver and it will get broken for parts or the whole lot will end up on ebay where I'll notice it and call the cops ;)

What it does is reduces the value of stolen laptops quite heavily, if everyone did this then it'd make stealing laptops "a bad idea (tm)" as it'd cost a good percentage of the laptops value to get it sorted which would make it much less unattractive to the criminals.

Thanks Adam

On Sun, 2006-05-14 at 19:36 +0100, Richard Brooklyn wrote:

That's neat... I'll turn that on as well. I kinda figured it would be dead easy to bypass that, but what you write makes a lot of sense.

Thanks for the advice. I still want to encrypt things, longer term. But this gives me piece of mind for the mean time...

Adam's laptop is a Thinkpad isn't it ?

If that's the case then the built in Bios/Disk security is pretty strong. The laptop is almost completely useless without a replacement chip or a very convoluted method to reset the secure identifier (which I am NOT going to post on a mailing list)

reusing the drive isn't trivial either

Not saying it's unbreakable, but it's a very very good first step.

On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 23:53 +0100, Adam Bower wrote:

Yup, applies to both the Thinkpad and the Dell, of course the Thinkpad is a bit more convoluted than the Dell but both are an excellent first step toward discouraging people from nicking laptops.

Except of course a lot of thieves are stupid. They won't realise that you've locked it down until they have nicked it, at which point they will just dump it or sell it to someone who has the facilities to get rid of the password.

I get your point though, if every laptop manufacturer did this as well as IBM and pretty much enforced the security out of the box then we would see less laptop theft. Trouble is given peoples tendency to forget login credentials I am guessing this would cause a lot of support headaches.

Actually I think Thinkpad's have the best anti theft defence, they often look (to the untrained eye) a lot older than they are (because the design hasn't really changed much from about 1995). Put a nice IBM T series next to a shiny silver Packard Hell and I'll bet the Packard gets nicked first (good riddance too, but that's a personal opinion)

On 17-May-06 Adam Bower wrote:

Although, data leakage is an interesting problem given that my "new" camera turned up today from Watford Electronics/Savastore.com which was supposed to have "missing or damaged packaging" as soon as I got it I suspected something was wrong and ran Photorec ( http://www.cgsecurity.org/photorec.html ) on it and found that the previous owner had recorded a picture of his/her baby and a very short video of their baby attacking the packaging of the camera.

Reminds me of the time (bearly 15 years ago now) when I wandered into a Dixon's looking around for a fax machine.

Saw what looked like a good one on offer -- "Display Model". Had a look at it, seemed OK, bought it.

When I got it home and was setting it up, I saw that it had a phone number on it (as the number it gives out for "Fax From"). So I rang that number and found its previous owner, who had returned it "because it didn't work".

In fact the reason it didn't work was that the transparent platen through which the document is scanned was stained with streaks of Typex (? Tippex). Where had that come from?

Well, above previous owner had been through the same experience as me -- found a number on it and phoned it, and found himself talking to the previous previous owner who'd also taken it back for some reason! Hadn't sussed out the problem though.

Once I cleaned the platen it worked fine, and works fine still!

Not to mention a guy who posted a Word doc as an attachment to a mailing list I'm on. You can usually get the gist of a Word doc by running 'strings' on it. But then you get all textual material in the file, not just what Word would show you if you opened it in Word. In this case there was a residue from some previous version which included an embarrassing excerpt from an exchange with the Police ... Beware Fast Save!!!

Best wishes to all, Ted.

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