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Comment by tokenizerrr | Hacker News Reader

Say you have your own hardware, what would you need to access the display and keyboard securely remotely over the network? Are there such devices available? I imagine you can have the OS disable its display and keyboard input after boot for added security, and lock down the boot process, but it still seems like it's hard to do this securely. I'm trying to think of a scenario where you can have:

1) Full Disk Encryption

2) Two physical machines owned by you, perhaps stored in some basement

3) Be able to boot them back on without physical access (perhaps this is simply a Bad Idea?)

4) One machine with two NICs running Tor, exposing only Tor to one of the NICs

5) The other machine running a VM host with 1 VM for each of your services. The host is connected to the NIC of the first machine, thus only has access to the internet through Tor

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> Full Disk Encryption

[…]

> Be able to boot them back on without physical access (perhaps this is simply a Bad Idea?)

This is exactly the problem which our project solves:

http://www.recompile.se/mandos

Introduction:

http://www.recompile.se/mandos/man/intro.8mandos

Summary:

The computers run a small client program in the initial RAM disk environment which will communicate with a server over a network. All network communication is encrypted using TLS. The clients are identified by the server using an OpenPGP key; each client has one unique to it. The server sends the clients an encrypted password. The encrypted password is decrypted by the clients using the same OpenPGP key, and the password is then used to unlock the root file system, whereupon the computers can continue booting normally.

Mandos is pretty cool. Debian and Ubuntu can also embed dropbear into the initramfs so you can ssh in and unlock the disk.

Dropbear (SSH access) still requires you to manually log in and unlock the disks; a primary feature of Mandos is that it can boot completely unattended (unless configured otherwise).

Yup, I've used Mandos, just stating that there are other options if you don't want automatic.

Mandos can be configured to be not automatic by setting the “approved_by_default” option for a client to “False” in the clients.conf file; See mandos-clients.conf(5): (http://www.recompile.se/mandos/man/mandos-clients.conf.5).

You also need to adjust the “approval_delay” setting.

My chrome browser thinks your site isn't "trusted". Gogle's not a fan?

It’s just the CAcert certificate which doesn’t exist in Chrome. Either ignore it or install the CAcert root certificate from http://www.cacert.org/?id=3

"Say you have your own hardware, what would you need to access the display and keyboard securely remotely over the network?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KVM_switch#KVM_over_IP_.28IPKV...

Thanks, that's what I was thinking of but I couldn't think of the name.

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