Someone swiped Nancy Pelosi’s laptop from her office. Those who know the story, know that it was said the laptop was only used as a Display device. Nothing private on it.
But what about your Laptop, if it was stolen. Not just the Drive Encryption, which is likely that some might pick up that Password by Over the Shoulder, Coffee shop Cameras, wild hunch Password testing. Your Flash Drives?
While average people might feel comforted by having the feature of, 'Find my Device."
I uh, that allows someone to know where my laptop is who is just surveilling me. Which brings up, am I only concerned with Privacy, or Security against a more ruthless adversary.
Likely they could do the same by tracking my email account login.
Anyone want to explain not what is good idea to do, Or never to do; but what they have already implemented. Why that would not work in some setups, situations.
Not sure what exactly you are asking. You should define your threat model and choose your defense against it.
If you are concerned about the stolen laptop with sensitive data, you should encrypt it. If you are concerned about someone seeing your password over the shoulder or with cameras, you can enter password like Snowden does.
If you are not concerned about those attacks and prefer to be able to “find your device”, that’s your choice.
In Qubes, the default full disk encryption should leave you with piece of mind for most threat models. But one should always keep XKCD’s reality check in mind:
(Have you noticed they are using asymmetric encryption for disk encryption on the image? Could this be an XKCD fail? O.o)
Edit: please note that if when stolen the computer was not shut down, the full disk encryption may not protect you, since the decryption key is in memory and may be retrievable (advanced attackers only).
My question is, while we run the "most secure OS. How many of our forum use their best knowledge of how to protect themselves against a stolen laptop?
I have been of the feeling that a home user connection can be used by ISP to spy on what we do. My ISP was fined several times by the government, and found another technical means to do the spying to augment their income by selling data on their users. Until Trump took office, who was Pro Business, if it makes the company money, then sure the company is allowed to do that.
Are public WiFi’s safer? Well.
My question is not about what might be done, but do we really follow through by our implementation. Take a lead line blanket to the coffee shop.
Well, the above doesn’t really have much to do with stolen laptops, I think. So I’d ask for the discussion to stay focused on “Stolen Qubes laptops”. Feel free to open another thread if you want to discuss something else (as longs as Qubes-related).
If someone steals your computer, probably will not be in the process of unlocking the computer. Especially if he sees software like qubes os he will not even understand it. He will probably shred / wipe the disk and resell it.
A physical attack assumes that the attacker knows something very important that is on your computer. The only way to avoid it is to not share secrets or information with people around you about what you may have stored on your laptop. Use hard disk encryption and do not store for example private keys of bitcoin addresses.
Most attacks take place online. Use different phrases and not simple codes. Something that only you will know For example (I & ^ amAfraiDsomuchofgettinGhaCked999%) Date of birth, names of relatives, dogs etc are prohibitive. If you use social media the chances increase because you are exposed in public and your information is diffuse. Do not connect to public networks with the same computer you use at home. A malicious network connection can cause you a big problem
Google records your location even when you tell it not to. So “find my device” working all day and night. My point is specific. Do not use google and any application related to google. The same goes for mobile phones. When you connect to any network the geolocation is simultaneous whether you use google or not.
