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Re: Does Security matter at all?



>>>>> "Remco" == Remco Blaakmeer <remco-blaakmeer@quicknet.nl> writes:

    Remco> Please also consider the case where people have limited,
    Remco> supervised physical access to a computer. They can change
    Remco> disks, pull the power plug and press the reset button, but
    Remco> they won't be able to open a computer case without drawing
    Remco> attention. This is a fairly common situation in schools and
    Remco> universities, where students have to be able to save their
    Remco> own documents on a floppy disk or work on documents that
    Remco> have been previously stored on a floppy disk, and even in
    Remco> people's homes.

As was said somewhere else (maybe even in this mailing list):

1. rebooting a computer *could* cause suspicion in itself. All you need
is some autoping system that regularly pings the computer (might not
be scalable for large networks). In any-case, it is difficult to hide
a reboot, as uptime will always show it.

2. if the BIOS is password protected, opening up the computer case in
front of a security camera is potentially very unsafe...

3. Then again, it depends what you are trying to protect, and what
insecure protocols are being used. Would anyone notice if I set up my
laptop computer next to a public Unix system, plugged it into the
network instead, and mounted a "secure" NFS filesystem?
-- 
Brian May <bam@debian.org>



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