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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • IMO, its not a brand issue. Its a seller/batch/brand issue. Hard drives are sensitive to vibration, and if you buy multiple drives from the same place, at the same time, and all the same brand and model, you might be setting yourself up for a bad experience if someone accidentally slammed those boxes around earlier in their life.

    I highly recommend everyone buy their drives from different sellers, at different times, spread out over various models from different brands. This helps eliminate the bad batch issue.







  • Secure boot helps protect against evil maid attacks by checking hardware and OS signatures. If the boot process has been tampered with, the user can be alerted that the secure boot process can no longer properly verify signatures.

    While its probably true that you can no longer guarantee that system can be used safely ever again, at least you will be aware that it was tampered with and you can go ahead and send that system to e-waste and get you a new system.



  • It seems the issue here is that initramfs is not signed, which makes this attack possible.

    If it is signed and an evil maid modifies the initramfs itself, it will break the secure boot process and the user will be notified that their system has been tampered with. This should indicate that the secure boot protection is working.

    If initramfs is not signed and it drops to the debug shell, then the attacker can make any changes to your system without it affecting secure boot, since it has already passed the protection. At least that’s my understanding when I read this.






  • Radio is referring to the proprietary piece of hardware that is in every cell phone that handles the physical portion of transmitting radio waves for wireless connectivity. This piece of hardware generally handles LTE/5G, wifi, and bluetooth.

    Your IMEI is the identifier that is burned into that hardware, which uniquely lets the carriers determine if your device can authenticate on their networks.

    You can turn off the radio by disabling your cellular network or turning on airplane mode on your phone. You will temporarily lose access to your cellular network until you turn it back on.

    Newer devices don’t require SIM cards to connect. They have eSIM cards that can be used. You still need one or the other to connect to a cellular network.