The U.S. government has charged Samuel Tunick with allegedly typing in a passcode to wipe his phone before officers could search it. “I hope people understand that the charges against me are meant to intimidate people,” he said.
Just another example of the Trump admin trying to intimidate protestors using whatever the fuck they can to bring up whatever charges they can.
I don’t really know anything about privacy and security in this context, but I remember playing around with encrypted disks and reading that encryption isn’t really useful if your adversary knows that something exists albeit encrypted.
I think this is similar: having a freshly wiped phone is going to attract attention. I’m not saying it’s the wrong move in all cases, but it’s probably the wrong move in the kinds of situations most people are going to encounter.
I think the latest advice for attending protests and similar is to take a cheap burner.
The duress password is literally the solution to this.
After the keys are wiped, they can’t get the data - even if you give them the password before or after they repeatedly hit you with a wrench
What we really need is deniable encryption, where you can decrypt just a specific layer of your device which is entirely innocent, while also possibly destroying the deeper layer which has anything incriminating. It’s been a concept since the 90s, but it’s not widely used or known of.
Veracrypt can do this with hidden volumes. The danger is the hidden layer can look stable and fake so you need enough data that changes recently enough, and if you add too much to either volume it starts corrupting everything because one partition overwrites the other.
The trouble here is that this happened to him in an airport, not during a protest.
Emphasis added.
I remember reading warnings about having laptops and devices checked at airports a decade ago. As a matter of fact I think that’s why I was looking into having hidden, encrypted partitions: because getting caught with some pirate TV series on my laptop might have meant having to pay a bribe or whatever.
Regardless, it doesn’t really change my point - if there’s a chance you’re going to interact with a government official and they might want to look at your device, wiping it is going to attract attention.
Which according to mafia he has about the same rights as Fauci’s beagles. Which is what makes this case interesting. The bewigged political activists will be doing legal cartwheels to keep the “before admitted to US” scam alive.
I mean, most people don’t know their encryption keys. A correct password retrieves the keys from the TPM, the duress pin wipes the TMP so now even a correct password is unable to get any of the data.
Hell, even if you use the same password in multiple locations (you shouldn’t) a good service will salt (add a random but consistent jumble of characters for your account specifically) and then hash (weird complicated math that makes it really hard to reverse your password) your salted password then check if that salted hash matches what’s on file.