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Comment by rthille | Hacker News Reader

Because he wipes (writes to) the read-only USB stick? (The one that's had the firmware replaced with BadUSB, and which he then sticks in some other piece of hardware where it takes control of the machine and uploads his private key?

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Not sure what you mean. The USB stick gets mounted as read-only on boot, so while technically you could write to it, this does not happen. The key never gets written to the USB stick, and is only kept in memory, sent to the wired printer as an QR code, and of course the Yubikey. I then wipe the USB just because, but there is no real point in doing so.

The largest vulnerability here would be the printer having some kind of memory, since BadUSB is a myth.

The whole laptop, no memory, no network, etc... Just for this.

I'm not sure if they are serious or if they really do so. If they do, that's quite some dedication to security.

I work with keys used to move hundreds of millions of dollars. The effort to have an air gapped network is definitely worth it.

I certainly don't do that for the keys I use to access my home computer though.

Security is economics: what's it worth to attack you?

Ah! That makes more sense. The closest I've come is working on an isolated network in a secured environment.

I can't be specific, but I'm pretty sure the data I worked with had very little comparative value.

It's an old laptop. Instead of throwing it in the trash, I kept it around.

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