OTOH, carrying around a microphone connected to the Internet which can be remotely enabled at any time without leaving any real trace (battery use/network use is the only real sign, although even that could be covered up to a great degree -- there is probably a way to do either low-fidelity or infrequent audio pickup, maybe keyed on location and charger state, and on-device pre-processing) -- people do this all the time Mostly because there's no real alternative to carrying smartphone yet.
Plus, of course, there's the fact that no modern desktop OS is particularly secure -- either you give up auto-updates and likely fall to bugs, or use auto-updates and are at risk to your OS vendor or anyone who can compel him. So sensors attached to it, as well as stuff processed on it, is also at risk. You can somewhat mitigate this through a large combination of other protections, but it's almost impossible for a single user single machine to solve that problem.
I'd love a custom run of Dell Chromebook 13 or Lenovo Thinkpad 13 Chrome Edition with no built-in mic/camera, and an EPROM vs. EEPROM, and some special case features. Would be willing to commit to buy 10k units at ~$800/unit retail in 8-16GB x 32GB config.
Personally I'd prefer to buy off-the-shelf hardware and just snip the mic and camera.
The commenter you're replying to would be better off giving his money to a company that puts privacy (and FOSS) above all else, instead of trying to bribe a lost cause (let's not forget about the 3 times Lenovo has been caught with nasty factory-installed malware on their consumer laptops).
Here's the Librem laptop homepage: https://puri.sm/products/
So it's here.
And yet somehow, I manage
So, yes, the audio thing is something to worry about.
So, OEM buys 10k units, chooses a few samples and tests them. Then he sends all the units on to his logistics warehouse to fulfill customer orders. The shipment from the testing facility to the warehouse is an interesting target now. Alternatively, the outgoing orders from that logistics warehouse.
An induvidual customer buying one laptop is no closer to his goal of ensuring no outside party tampered with it.
> published specs
I'm curious how published specs help a regular user verify his laptop does not contain manufacturing backdoors.
I've seen many suggestions for hardware integrity, but none of them enables the end user to verify that his hardware exactly matches with the published schematics/ASIC masks. They all simplify the problem description to only reach part of the way, requiring trust on part of the end user in all the later links in the chain. Or they just assume that the customer is buying 10k units - which does nothing to help individual end-users.
Most people would settle for a physical switch, that is, a switch in hardware.
Personally, I am not worried about quite sophisticated attackers. When securing my house I'm worried about run-of-the-mill burglars, and this is like that.
Rdl specified Dell or Lenovo also for the reason that the supply chain for those two ecosystems are well-developed enough that providing customer support won't be a huge hassle.
AFAIK the airbag accelerometers are designed to detect much larger accelerations than e.g. the ones in a smartphone, and are thus essentially completely insensitive to anything lesser than a huge impact -- spurious airbag inflation is one of the things the manufacturers really, really don't want to happen.
Many of them are just mechanical switches actuated by a weight, with no active electronics (makes sense for such a safety device to be as simple as possible): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWSlwhYyOhI
And even when not impacting anything, a car is not exactly a quiet and vibration-free environment either...
But if you do indeed manage to not carry a mobile phone at all, yep, you are safe.
My contract expires in two weeks, I am not going to renew it.
For an OS, I run Whonix and have it configured so the system wipes the memory and shuts down immediately if anything foreign is attached or removed from USB.
Since I don't use any eSata or Firewire devices, if those ports exist I epoxy over them. There are too many ways to dump memory with direct DMA access.
If you were serious about a custom run of security-focused laptops, I think you would have a market for them. Dell and Lenovo just subcontract with manufacturers in China and it wouldn't be too difficult to contact one and give them the specs and do a custom run of laptops. Considering putting actual hardware switches for both the Wifi and Bluetooth.
I would certainly buy one!
I would imagine, depending on how it is done, that the malicious usb device might get a few keystrokes in before the system is completely down.
On some ThinkPad models, there is a chip associated with the LAN management engine (AMT) that should be disabled as well. This isn't the Management Engine controller itself, only has a power management role for AMT & WoL that cannot normally be disabled.
My ThinkPad has a physical switch for Wifi and Bluetooth, although apparently that is only window dressing and can be bypassed with a BIOS setting (& configuration tool from Lenovo)
What do you think of having a hardware firewall processor for the Wifi and Ethernet interfaces on security focused laptops?
I'd even try it myself, but I don't have a facebook account, or any devices with "personal assistant" apps for that matter. For the obvious reasons.
The FTC just made an announcement about SilverPush, an example of such software:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/03/ftc-i...
But yes the question is whether or not that actually exists.
On the other hand, with an external webcam, I can simply disconnect it. If you have a laptop built into a laptop that is not so easy to do. At least, you have to trust the laptop's manufacturer to do that, while a builtin plastic cover is so simple one does need to "trust" it; at the same time, you can't retrofit it on a laptop... :(