Hi all,

American traveling to China for IETF, and making my tech prep plans (bringing a laptop, phone, tablet, kindle, and steam deck). I won’t bias with my current plans too much, but I do already run Linux+LUKS and GrapheneOS.

For those with experience, what tech prep would you do?

Thanks!

  • dgdft@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    19 hours ago

    Genuine curiosity: What kind of hardware bug would you go for if you wanted to spy on a relatively easy target like a Thinkpad from ten years ago, and had 1-2 hours to install it?

    My naive guess would be intercepting the monitor cable to pull occasional screencaps, but then you’d need a wireless modem to transmit out and you’d have pretty serious limitations on power draw (assuming you’re running off a cell battery and not splicing in somewhere).

    • nomad@infosec.pub
      1·
      15 hours ago

      Hardware bugs are put on the storage. Allows injecting data into ram or backdooring the OS.

      • dgdft@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        14 hours ago

        I can absolutely see that making sense for a targeted attack.

        Are there bootkits in the wild that can reliably bootstrap to a rootkit on most non-Windows hosts these days? The hard part of that approach would be having a bootkit payload sophisticated enough to escalate to a meaningful form of exfiltration, I imagine.