Re: Re: In light of what has happened with the theft of the VA laptop, what are the "best practices" for securing laptops?

[michal () bartkowiak biz]

Hmm what if bad guys remove your hard drive to bypass power-on passwords and then replace unencrypted kernel with 
theirs one? Is it safe to trust userland applications (for integrity checking) if someone can play with syscalls etc? I 
guess NOT. That kind of integrity checking can be useful only when is made on "cold disk" from another system and 
different media.
I think that all unencrypted data needed for system bootup shold be on usb flash drive (for example) and used only 
during system start-up. Ofcourse now you should care about physical secuirty of this external media. Plus you get two 
factor authentication. It's important since we are talking about mobile devices that are used in random places and it 
could be easier for bad guys to get your passphrase by spying on you.

Michal

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