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Date:      Wed, 15 Sep 2004 19:30:19 -0500
From:      Frank Knobbe <frank@knobbe.us>
To:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Booting encrypted
Message-ID:  <1095294619.633.206.camel@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <200409072022.i87KM7Kf049770@wattres.Watt.COM>
References:  <200409072022.i87KM7Kf049770@wattres.Watt.COM>

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On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 15:22, Steve Watt wrote:
> Having the password compiled in to something that's necessarily clear-tex=
t
> on the same media?

Sorry for being late... I'm still catching up on piles of email :)


Instead of having a plaintext password on the same media, how about a
mechanism that reads the CPU's serial number, or some other hardware
dependent number that can not be read by users on a system. If the drive
gets removed from the system, the attacker would have a challenge.

Of course you have to be careful before you replace failed hardware that
is used to derive the key :)  Don't replace the failed CPU before you
decrypted... no wait... uhm...   :)   Okay, how about an offline copy of
the number in case of hardware failure... :)

Seriously though, tying the boot process to a hardware dependent value
that is not accessible from within the booted system might be something
to consider.=20

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Frank


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