let's say for a moment that you're the kind of person who takes cyber security
super serial you use a password manager
with multi-factor everything you keep all your programs and operating systems
up to date and you're constantly keeping a vigilant eye out for phishing attacks
that is all really good stuff that we should
actually all do but none of it will do you a bit of good if
an attacker actually gets your hardware
in their hands like physically
that is unless you're using a tamper-proof orwell computer from design
shift a pc that needs a password
and a fob just to boot up and that apparently will
disable itself permanently if we mess with it
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description
named for george orwell every one of these tiny yet shockingly heavy little
machines has its own unique encryption key one that is totally unknown even to
the manufacturer design shift it's a time rotating rsa 4096 key so that is
over 4 000 bits long and what it means
is that it is practically impossible to brute force so for reference the largest
rsa number that's ever been factored was only
768 bits long and that took hundreds of
computers over two years to figure out
now this encryption key is not stored in main memory or on the self-encrypting
SSD but rather in a security microcontroller that only exposes it
briefly when a user is authenticated like as you're booting up as for how to
authenticate well two-factor of course
orwell comes with two special key fobs that must be scanned on the machine
before you'll even be prompted to enter your numeric password using orwell's
OLED display and only then does the
machine boot up and then you will still need to enter credentials for Windows
ubuntu cubes os or whatever your fobs use nfc
for the initial setup then once they're paired the java card applet on the fob
that's responsible for pairing is actually deleted and from then on the
fobs communicate their distance from orwell over encrypted low energy
bluetooth and the machine will actually lock down if you get more than 10 meters
away in lockdown mode orwell's ports
that's two five gigabit usb type cs for power and peripherals and a mini HDMI
for the display are shut off so no one can plug in their stuxnet flash drive or
boot the computer using an external device and the CPU is put to sleep
that is unless the main board secure mcu's three axis accelerometers and
gyroscopes detect movement at which time it will actually be powered completely
off forcing a potential hacker to build their lab around the machine
rather than carrying it away to be prodded at in privacy
okay then Linus what if i go around the mcu by freezing
it with a spray refrigerant well since the mcu also monitors for
drastic temperature changes freezing it will actually result in orwell
destroying the encryption key and even if you could freeze the RAM for
example which typically retains information for a few seconds after
being powered down you'd have a hard time reading anything from it because it
is soldered onto the board and going at it the other way isn't an option either
the boot sequence is designed to wipe the RAM before post to prevent attackers
from somehow inserting code into the memory during boot
i mean most of that stuff though is kind of hypothetical anyway because you probably
would never get that far the entire system is physically tamper proof and
i'm not talking about a handful of pressure sensors that you can just drill
holes around and disable no no the entire system in addition to the main
board mcu and the mcu and the fob the
system is wrapped in a conductive dye shield with multiple pressure switches
and a wire mesh barrier this protects against physical ingress and certain
side channel attacks like over-the-air power analysis since no meaningful power
leakage will make it through the die shield and if you disturb any of that
stuff the encryption key gets nuked and all of this works even without
orwell being plugged in since the main board mcu's onboard battery can actually
last for several months now to be clear
security features like this have been around for years in some industries but
design shifts pitch is that they're delivering bank level information
security for everyone without changing the overall user experience
and they're actually mostly there the fobs are a little too bulky right
now in my opinion and while they are rechargeable over micro usb they lack a
battery indicator light so when they die and your orwell locks down you're gonna
have a bad time but once you're logged into orwell it
behaves just like a regular computer as advertised
so that's really cool but i still think their audience will
end up being somewhat limited the orwell breezed through our thermal tests
staying relatively quiet without throttling but even the top tier model
sticks you with a mobile processor eight gigs of RAM and integrated graphics and
that's at three times the cost of a similarly spec'd tablet computer
to be clear that could be considered cheap compared to some of the other
options that are out there and there are definitely going to be customers for
this tech but i just have to wonder if the next step for design shift has to be
a notebook to give extra flexibility to
anyone who wants to take his or her secure computing
on the road alright then
with all that out of the way let's see if we can lose our data
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LTT we're going to have that linked below
do
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