On 12/29/2016 07:23 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
The point is that hard disks can be stolen; not by chance, but intentionally.
I've heard about incidents where a burglar opened up every desktop machine in a business and made away with a sack of hard drives. Some swag! Very obviously targeted and very obviously a case of industrial espionage. This was at a security seminar, the speaker was from CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (very roughly the Canadian equivalent of the FBI with a bit of the CIA mixed in). He illustrated his presentation with photos of the offices and comments on the physical security. You don't have to be a security droid to see the point he was making, that those people had Piss Poor Physical security. My biggest objection to encryption with Linux is that it feels clunky. I've used some forms of military and commercial data encryption and by comparison LUKS is .... awkward. And in reality, there are many threats that encryption does NOT protect against. The obvious one, as I've pointed out, is an 'attack' on a running system. That's not just the classical over-the-wire attacks, it includes phishing and as I've mentioned the theft of a running laptop as John Stanford described in his novel "The hanged man's song" Then there's the "Cold boot" attack; the memory retains an image and perhaps they key even after the system has been shut down. Such attacks have been demonstrated to be effective against full disk encryption schemes of various vendors and operating systems, even where a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) secure cryptoprocessor is used. This is because the problem is fundamentally a hardware (insecure memory) and not a software issue. "Obviously" the solution is to encrypt your memory as well :-) And then there's human shortcoming. Security is always a cost-benefit exercise. Is the data important enough to warrant the expense, the effort and the inconvenience? This is a business decision, not a technical issue. -- Policies, as distinct from Strategies, must match organizational culture. If this is unable or unwilling to monitor and enforce policies and/or sanction non-compliance, there is no point to having policies - other than to show the auditors that they exist. I've seen organizations pay consultants substantial sums to have a policy portfolio which is then filed and not acted upon. -- Eduardo Gelbstein August 2012 (on LinkedIn) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org