Re:Fun with your friend's Facebook and Tinder sessions
by mFixman on Tuesday December 16, 2014 @05:17PM
(#8759937)
Couldn't the author just copy Steve's private key to his computer then?
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Re:Fun with your friend's Facebook and Tinder sessions
by Xcelerate on Tuesday December 16, 2014 @07:45PM
(#8760476)
Not if it's a hardware key. You give the processor something you want to encrypt, but you can't look at the actual key itself (the only way to do that would be with an electron microscope).
Re:Fun with your friend's Facebook and Tinder sessions
by geofft on Wednesday December 17, 2014 @12:47AM
(#8761242)
That said, if you could gain persistent remote access to the computer, you can just repeatedly ask the processor to encrypt things.
This is incidentally part of why the Chromebook design makes it hard to persistently change the machine; a reboot starts from a clean signed image and then mounts a home directory. It's still possible to stick a persistent exploit somewhere in the home directory, but it's not as simple as just dropping a file in /etc/init.