Great piece. Get thee to a "Secure Enclave" supported device, everyone.

HillRat · on Feb 17, 2016

John Kelley (@johnhedge), former Apple security engineer, says that Secure Enclave isn't protected against that kind of tampering, so that's not a solution, either. Until manufacturers start going to embedded HSMs, anyway.

venomsnake · on Feb 17, 2016

Or any rooted android. Good luck in defeating LUKS. No custom firmwares will help them.

scintill76 · on Feb 17, 2016

Make sure you set high enough LUKS master key iteration counts, and/or very complex password, so that they can't image the LUKS header and brute-force your passphrase off-device.

st3v3r · on Feb 17, 2016

A rooted android is even less secure.

venomsnake · on Feb 18, 2016

If you say so

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardenin...

feld · on Feb 17, 2016

a rooted android is probably easiest to own over the air with a push notification, so yeah, that's a great idea! NOT

carom · on Feb 17, 2016

Could you expand a little on what you're referring to? Is this a specific vulnerability?

venomsnake · on Feb 17, 2016

A powered down device rarely has that vulnerability.

paraxisi · on Feb 17, 2016

A powered down device isn't exactly terribly useful.

16bytes · on Feb 17, 2016

You can't send a powered down phone a push notification for post-hoc analysis.

You would have had to know the target and push a vulnerability beforehand, which wouldn't have helped in this case.

feld · on Feb 17, 2016

So power it on? It will still boot with encryption. Isn't Android encryption is an extension of ext4 and only protects some data. It's not full disk / LUKS last I knew.