Re: Password "security" - was"Passwords with Lan Manager (LM) under Windows" and "Whitespace in passwords"

[Rogan Dawes <discard () dawes za net>]

[The original poster seemed to be concerned about the laptop being stolen]

> > As I said, by using SYSKEY with a password-on-boot, I was hoping to
> > protect the cache entries stored on the laptops.  Without the SYSKEY
> > password, the machine won't boot, so an attacker could not dump the
> > cache (CacheDump) or get access to the LSA (LSADump2).  I also assume
> > that booting with another OS would not give the attacker access to the
> > EFS files because AES is pretty strong, the cache entries are encrypted
> > with a secret (NL$KM) which is stored in the LSA and the LSA is not
> > accessible because the system key is password protected by a password
> > which is not stored locally anymore.  I don't assume my reasoning is
> > foolproof, I just want to make sure deploying SYSKEY with a
> > password-on-boot will render our laptops harder to penetrate.

Have you thought about implementing a BIOS password on the hard drive?

Granted, there is no mechanism for locking out passwords, but I don't 
think that there are too many BIOS's that would allow you to automate a 
brute force attack . . . .

As far as I know, there is no method to override the hard drive password 
once it is set . . . (although maybe reformatting the whole disk might 
have some effect)

Regards,

Rogan

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