Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2008 15:08:56 -0700
________________________________________ From: Jeff Nye [jpn213 () gmail com] Sent: Monday, August 04, 2008 5:01 PM To: gordon () twiceasgood net Cc: David Farber Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop Hi Gordon, If you're willing to expose a port on your home network, then from your destination you could use scp to transfer the VM to your location using password authentication. Then you do not have to trust a third party. I still don't understand the goal of the CBP search policy. Suppose I arrive at the border with a laptop or 100 DVDs full of random looking data. That data could be noise or it could be encrypted nuclear secrets. As far as I can tell, CBP has no way to distinguish between the two cases because the data could have been XORed with a one time pad. If CBP asks me whether the DVDs contain any encrypted data, they lose because I can (a) lie, or (b) correctly answer "yes" and provide a "key" that is the XOR of my data with a stream of zeros. I don't see an effective response from CBP for either choice. So I'm puzzled why they're putting people through the hassle. Jeff On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 3:17 PM, David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:
________________________________________ From: Gordon Syme [gordon () twiceasgood net] Sent: Monday, August 04, 2008 2:58 PM To: David Farber Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop I'm starting to think that the only "safe" way to get your laptop into the US would be to create a VM containing your chosen OS and data and then leave this at home. Travel without a laptop until you arrive at your destination. At this point you can acquire a machine, generate a keypair and export the public key. A trusted third party then encrypts the VM and makes it available for download, probably with a service like Amazon's S3. The VM can contain all your actual data contained in encrypted volumes to minimise the risk of having to trust a third party (though this would require transporting a private key inside the VM). This way you avoid the problem of taking data through the border and also of taking a password through with you, the keys don't exist yet so how could you reveal the password? Nothing carried through and nothing concealed. It's an awful lot of work to get around the risk of border searches (and the associated data grabbing) and skirts around the problem rather than tackling it head-on through legal means. I suspect that there are definite business cases for going to this effort though. -Gordon
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Current thread:
- Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop David Farber (Aug 02)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop David Farber (Aug 02)
- Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop David Farber (Aug 02)
- Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop David Farber (Aug 02)
- Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop David Farber (Aug 03)
- Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop David Farber (Aug 03)
- Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop David Farber (Aug 03)
- Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop David Farber (Aug 04)
- Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop David Farber (Aug 04)
- Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop David Farber (Aug 04)
- Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop David Farber (Aug 04)
- Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop David Farber (Aug 06)
- Re: Peter Swire: No, You Can't Search My Laptop David Farber (Aug 07)