Which way is that?
Also, from your Tinfoil Hat Linux link, this idea is hilariously awesome:
Keystroke monitoring — THL has gpggrid, a wrapper for GPG that lets you use a video game style character entry system instead of typing in your passphrase. Keystroke loggers get a set of grid points, not your passphrase.
I wonder if it might be possible to implement that idea into other operating systems?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-rema...
Air gapping is certainly not unprecedented, but individuals using it have traditionally been considered pretty "tinfoil-y".
edit: "I wonder if it might be possible to implement that idea into other operating systems?"
gpggrid itself could probably just be built on any other Linux install. Certainly it could be recreated. One of the neat features of TFL that I really like is the idea of blinking LEDs on the users keyboard instead of displaying things on screen. Effective? Who knows... but certainly amusing.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08...
Search for "Bootable SD Card Method" here: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Prepare_your_SD_card (I have a Canon camera that runs CHDK. Those instructions work, and the camera can write to the SD card.)
It's a Linux live system (with permanent storage on a USB stick) geared specifically towards online banking.
I believe that quite a few people actually use it.
Of course the hardware is the same, but you get a clean single purpose software system.
>I believe that quite a few people actually use it.
That sounds like a great attack vector. How secure are factories where discs are pressed? Even without access to the factory you could buy a bunch of magazines and repackage them with compromised CDs.
Repackaging it seems to be tricky, since the paper inlay is bound in the magazine, it's not just stuck on the cover or whatever. You tear it out at a perforation, leaving part of the DVD cover inside.
There are much more exposed attack vectors on online banking users, I would think.
And you can always just download the ISO and check it against the hash (and the PGP key).
These are still not immune to phishing attacks but it's a lot better than TAN codes or some other 'dumb' authentication scheme.
Typically these systems work in conjunction with pin-and-chip card, a small piece of hardware that generates the codes and a challenge / response system built into the website you use for the authorization.
Separate challenges exist for logging in (read access) and transferring money.
Another cool thing I've seen in Banco do Brasil was the need to authorize the computer you're going to use in a ATM or in a 1-800. If I recall correctly, they do that with a Java applet.
Recently they also launched a common-malware-search-and-destroy application of MANDATORY use in Windows computers (my mom uses, she asked me. And yes, the digital certificates were all valid).
Others may use in-house solutions. Here's Bank of America's two factor solution: https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/faq/safepass-faq.go
We're almost to a point where the question isn't whether or not they support it, it's finding out that they have a program, clicking through tiny text links at the bottom of pages, and figuring out how yet-another-implementation works.
The general idea is to use a machine which has minimal opportunity to be compromised through other activities. There have been known to be exploits that allow a compromised VM guest to compromise the host, and obviously if you compromise the host you can compromise all the other guests.
Using a separate VM is worse than using a separate physical machine and better than doing nothing. Whether it's "good enough" depends on who you are. Who are the plausible attackers? What do you stand to lose if it goes wrong?
[1] in other words if the host OS is used as a hypervisor, or if the host OS _is_ a hypervisor.
Oh so he encrypted his files, and walked them between his stand alone and his internet machines. Yeah, okay this established the file's integrity, and that's just fantastic.
But what assurance does he have that the USB stick isn't getting infected on the internet machine, and then deploying stealth hacksaw services onto the standalone, to buffer and relay data and commands each time it jacks in?
I mean, that's exactly what Stuxnet was designed to fucking do.
Things like the Bagram PX were concentrations of high value targets with only one source of supply. The general USB stick marketplace is a lot safer. In China they're often fake and thus unreliable (smaller than advertised), but in the US, I'd be pretty comfortable driving to a Best Buy 50 miles away and picking up a random USB token.
A USB key someone hands you is much more likely to be a targeted attack. A USB key randomly lying on the ground outside a target is also much more likely to be an attack.
That doesn't mean there are no attacks.
So prudence is adviced in either case, on the off chance that the one that you have is a bad one. Ditto for anything else that you stick into a USB port.
That webcam plugged into your computer, are you sure the mike isn't on all the time and that the driver doesn't pass your speech during the day out in compressed and encrypted form to some server farm at night ;)
IMHO, the hard part would be creating the interface on the on the pc.
This should be the new market: Companies inviting the whole world to inspect their hardware (in addition to firmware, software).
KDE/Gnome do the same thing, and there are possible attacks there.
https://www.schneier.com/contact.html
All default settings, except the 4096-bit key length.
See: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/my_new_gpgpgp...
Randomizing the position of landmarks eg. go to A, B, E, C, F, then showing a map could let the user enter a different sequence of keystrokes to get the same result.