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Many people believe, including some well known security experts, that it is advisable to fully power down your laptop when you use full disk encryption in order to prevent attacks via FireWire/PCMCIA or ”Coldboot” attacks. The examples of physical attacks given in the documentation, e.g. modifying the hardware or attaching a malicious hardware, is something that most users would disregard as too expensive an attack to be afraid of. However, they do not explicitly warn users of a possibility of something as simple and cheap as the Evil Maid Attack. Let’s quickly recap the Evil Maid Attack. So, how should we protect against such Evil Maid attacks? But note that our Evil Maid attack is an example of a “physical” attack, that doesn’t require any hardware modification and is extremely cheap. Now, Evil Maid will be logging the passphrases provided during the boot time. You should always obtain permission from other people before testing Evil Maid against their laptops! To retrieve the recorded passphrase just boot again from the Evil Maid USB — it should detect that the target is already infected and display the sniffed password.

Several months ago I had a discussion with one of the TrueCrypt developers about possible means of preventing the Evil Maid Attack, perhaps using TPM (see below). In a statement Monday, Amnesty said there had been “dozens of deaths” in the Tehran suburb of Shahriar, likely one of the areas with the highest toll of those killed in the unrest. And yet, there appears to have been some type of formal hierarchy within this network that drew upon its resources. We never consider the feasibility of hardware attacks; we simply have to assume the worst. Joanna Rutkowska: And how can you determine that the attacker have or have not “worked” with your hardware? If an attacker can physically access the computer hardware and you use it after the attacker has physically accessed it, then TrueCrypt may become unable to secure data on the computer. When only certain individuals are allowed access to certain areas, as company may wish to employ card readers. Of these “physical security” measures, one of the most prominent is what is known as “access control.” This practice allows for a facility to control who goes in and goes out of the property.

Now, there are concerns that one NATO member, Turkey, is being drawn into an alliance with Russia. Now, this is where our Evil Maid stick comes into play. You can get the source code for the Evil Maid infector here. After preparing the Evil Maid USB stick, you’re ready to test it against some TrueCrypt-encrypted laptop (more technically: a laptop that uses TrueCrypt system disk encryption). Sure, they write “or otherwise compromise the security of the computer”, which does indeed cover e.g. the Evil Maid Attack, but my bet is that very few users would realize what it really means. The current implementation of Evil Maid always stores the last passphrase entered, assuming this is the correct one, in case the user entered the passphrase incorrectly at earlier attempts. NOTE: It’s probably illegal to use Evil Maid to obtain password from other people without their consent. All the attacker needs to do is to sneak into the user’s hotel room and boot the laptop from the Evil Maid USB Stick. Evil Maid hooks the TC’s function that asks user for the passphrase, so that the hook records whatever passphrase is provided to this function.

After some 1-2 minutes, the target laptop’s gets infected with Evil Maid Sniffer that will record the disk encryption passphrase when the user enters it next time. TrueCrypt Developer: Given the scope of our product, how the user ensures physical security is not our problem. TrueCrypt Developer: We generally disregard “janitor” attacks since they inherently make the machine untrusted. Believe me it’s really is much more fun for me to write about things like new attacks on chipsets or virtualization. Invisible Things Lab cannot be held responsible for any potential damages this code or its derivates might cause. It’ll probably get passed to a system library which parses this dangerous format using native code. This can vary per user, but I would recommend keeping core system files, any folders where you share files, your download folder, and your browser registries. Why develop your own image when the Federal government is doing all the work for you with the Federal Desktop Core Configuration? CAUTION: The provided USB image and source code should be considered proof-of-concept only.