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Comment by bhaney | Hacker News Reader

I hope Zhang doesn't feel too bad for accidentally setting this in motion. The fault lies entirely with the manufacture's poor security practices and the overreaction of the corrections officials, but I bet there are still going to be people pointing fingers at him saying "you shouldn't have hacked that laptop and published your findings! Now all these students lost their laptops because of you!"

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There aren't even any poor security practices. It's just security theatre and the DOC is overreacting.

The article said the default admin password wasn’t changed. Thats not security theater that’s a legit goof. Why so cynical?

It does sound very much like an overreaction, from the manufacturer of these devices.

"The man who made the devices said there’s little someone inside could actually do with a hacked Securebook. They’d need to fashion a USB port, be able to install another operating system, and get access to a docking station, said Jeremy Schwartz, Justice Tech president. Even when the devices are docked, they’re not connected to the wider internet. "

When a critical part of a security system is defeated, saying “that’s okay we have other layers of security so they probably can’t do much” would be IMHO pretty horrible security practice. Taking the laptops away is horrible, but from a security perspective it’s not over reacting.

Assessing the balance between risk and the cost of mitigation sounds like it should be part of the basics.

Eh, true. But then both sides of the political spectrum would have been up their asses had they just said, "relax, its no big deal." Not something you want to hear from a prison (even a not-for-profit prison).

It doesn't even help you get to the end of the exploit chain. To boot anything they still needed to tap the touchpad USB lines and attach preimaged external USB storage. It's a goof but it's not a goof worth making 1200 incarcerated people's lives harder.

Why is it so bad to let prisoners have internet access or unrestricted access to a device anyway?

Sure, they can commit crimes with it.

But prisons obviously don't care about their charges committing crimes or they would take serious measures to prevent violence.

The bios password is known now, and you can't change it locally. Security practices aside, it does sound like collecting them and doing an update is required.

This is why we have layers of security.

This was one of the layers. It absolutely did not necessitate gathering up every single one at once.

Maybe they know about more issues than just the one the researcher discovered?

The secure boot password was stored as a SHA-1 hash. The machine was designed in a way that the password effectively can not be changed. Those are poor security practices.

These devices must now all be treated as if they’re rooted. That’s a gigantic security problem. Casual analysis here says “well it would be hard to install a new OS, so it’s not a big deal.” That is a terrible security assumption. We don’t know what other changes could be done to a rooted device, but anybody with a sensible security mindset would assume something undesirable is possible.

So, the outcome might be harsh, but it is NOT overreacting to promptly deal with secure devices becoming easily rooted.

> I bet there are still going to be people pointing fingers at him saying "you shouldn't have hacked that laptop and published your findings! Now all these students lost their laptops because of you!”

I wonder if they’d be in prison if they were given a free education and laptops before whatever life choices they made that sent them to prison.

>free education School?

Free education and laptops alone aren't enough for that.

They are certainly enough for some people, and really far from enough for others.

Knowing the shape of that distribution would be interesting.

People in most Western countries are given a free education. These people tend to be the ones that skipped out on school.

And sure, some are situational but at least from my school XP people were bunking because they thought they were too cool for school™

The person who shared the password publicly might feel a bit guilty.

That's something better suited for DMs

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