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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing that two way RF communication != "little risk of detection".

Anyway, this is the sort of thing I'd expect the NSA to be doing against specific targets. And I'd expect the targets to have equally sophisticated countermeasures.

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Sometimes the countermeasures are quite simple: a policy of "don't plug outside USB devices into the facility's PCs" can get you pretty far.

> a policy of "don't plug outside USB devices into the facility's PCs" can get you pretty far

A policy of "inject hot glue into exposed USB ports" gets you further.

That's exactly what I did. I started with glue to get in the contacts then occasionally followed with that metallic stuff that's like glue. PS2 ports work fine for keyboards and mice.

One can also do tricks like authenticated peripherals or profiling signatures of them. I had some designs on former. CompSci had results on latter. Not sure if there's any products in this area and if they'd be trustworthy.

And where do the keyboard and mouse plug in?

The authorized cables go through a hole in a secure enclosure that does not expose ports. Physically securing the computer is essential - if only to restrict access to mass storage by anyone with a screwdriver.

"Have screwdriver, cable, and laptop. Can bypass all INFOSEC."

This slogan should indeed never happen.

PS/2

Only if it's enforced, and in a culture of people who understand why it's important - a great many facilities have that policy, but if people think something like "oh, well, X is only a power cord, not actually using the computer", or it's blatantly ignored by even just e.g. cleaning staff charging their music players, you're going to have a bad time.

I worked as a contractor on a military installation a few years ago. We had a snarky, know-it-all new employee who decided to test the base's "no thumb drives" policy his very first day on base. Every employee and subsequent employee learned about the hell he went through as a result. Needless to say, no one tested the policy again.

It's simple to have a policy of not using unapproved hardware.

What's difficult is to build an organisation with a purchasing and new hardware approval process that's quick and efficient enough that people choose to follow it.

I've worked at places where the official policy said "no unapproved USB sticks" but getting approval was so difficult most of the engineering workforce installed Linux using unofficial USB sticks. As firing the most of the workforce for knowingly breaking policy would have been cutting off their nose to spite their face, the policy went unenforced.

TCSM companies stay in business because people rarely find or detect wireless bugs. They usually operate outside of the WiFi spectrum that enterprises might be analyzing. Even government or military groups with spectrum analyzers might not have good enough ones to stop a 10GHz bug or something odd like that. This isn't beginning to talk about wiring the bug to a line-of-sight wireless system (esp IR) they'd have to walk in between to detect.

Interior HFDF?

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