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OK,
let's get down to business.
This is Kurt Opsahl,
the general counsel of the office
on here, the
left.
Thank you.
There is William Bonnington
Technologist's
waving his hand.
And the topic is,
you all know, but let's say it again,
just for principle sake, protecting
your privacy at the border.
So let's have a hand for the affairs and
Kurt Opsahl and William Bonnington.
Thank you. Thank you very
much. Thank you all for coming out here
this evening.
We are here to talk about protecting your
privacy at the border.
As you mentioned, there were with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, an
organization dedicated
to defending your rights online.
And one of the rights we're concerned
about is privacy.
And one of the places where your privacy
can be very impacted is when you travel
across a border, especially
with your digital devices.
So I think many people will probably
understand this already.
But I want to start out with
of why is it important?
Why do we care about security,
privacy in your digital devices?
Well, there are a window into your soul.
What you can see in a digital device is
every aspect of your life.
The correspondence, you and the websites
you've been searching, the financial
records, your medical records.
These are the sorts of things that if
you give over control of your device,
someone can look into and
they often will have credentials or
someone could look into other aspects of
your life that are in the cloud
and other servers.
So it has a lot of very sensitive
information.
And in addition to the the information
that you may feel is
very private and sensitive for yourself,
there's also some information which for a
very long time in democratic societies
has been recognized as not just
sensitive, not just private information,
but things that are outside of the scope
of what would be properly obtained
by the government, things like
communications with your attorney,
communications between you and your
doctor, if you were a reporter
or a source, communications between those
two.
And these are fundamental principles
that still have a lot of value at the
border that we don't want to sacrifice
these human rights and these values
just because you're exercising your right
to travel and going across the border.
So for purposes of discussion, what is a
border?
So there are many ways of thinking about
a border. And we're not just talking
about sort of political borders.
Like when you go from here over to the
Netherlands, you probably are not going
to pass through a customs search point
and you're not going to be implicated
with some of the issues that we're
raising here today.
So it's not just the political borders,
but it's the points of entry into
into a zone like the Schengen zone.
And oftentimes these things are actually
not exactly on the border.
For example, an airport can
be, you know, hundreds of miles from the
physical border, but is treated as a
border because that's a port of entry.
And also, in some cases, the
border is actually at the departure
airport so the border can be
set up. So you go through that before
transferring on to the plane and into the
destination countries.
So this is what we're talking about in
terms of borders.
And at these points, the government
asserts more power and authority
to conduct searches than they do
throughout the rest of the country.
However, these these
these governmental authorities are
not beyond the power of human rights, law
and policy.
Some of these rights I I've quoted here
coming from the U.N. Declaration of Human
Rights and from the European
Convention on Human Rights, that
respecting your
privacy, your autonomy, your
correspondents, these are things that are
widely recognized as as fundamental
rights.
So here in the European Union,
they have sort of a two standard system
for EU citizens and others
who have a right of travel within the
European Union.
You go through a minimum check and
then if you're coming from a non-EU
country, you're subject to a thorough
check.
And this is usually done in up to up
to four stages.
There will be pre border checks.
So if you are traveling on an airline,
the airline will pass through some some
information about the passengers.
In some cases, that information may
also lead to a gate
check or a
check on the airline itself.
And then when you get to your
destination, they'll be a first line
check. And you probably have all gone
through this where you show your
password, have usually a short
conversation with the border agent.
And then if all goes well, you
go on your way.
But sometimes it goes
to a second line, check a more thorough
check where they're going to do a little
bit further investigation
some of the triggers that lead to this
second line. Check if there
are some issues in that that short
conversation that you've had, if they
don't like the way the things were
answered and the communication
difficulties, if there are any
irregularities in your documentation, if
you know, if your visa doesn't have the
right date or that maybe there's a
different spelling of the name on the
visa as the passport.
And perhaps most importantly, they will
do a database check.
They'll put your information into the
database and see if it comes back with
any signals or if there's any mismatch
with the computer's information, with the
documentation you have with you.
And these may lead to a.
In line check.
And in that second line check is where
you might undergo the more thorough
search. So you have the chart up here
showing the percentage of
people who, once they got to the second
line, had a more thorough search.
Now, this is not just device searches.
This is any kind of the more thorough
search. As you can see, there's actually
quite a bit of a difference in Charles de
Gaulle. This was in 2012,
48 percent of those who went to the
second line got the additional searching
while at Frankfurt, the low
number, only seven percent,
got the more thorough searching.
And also, just to give a sense of how
that might go.
We have a chart showing also from 2012
how long it might be.
So less than five minutes, up
to one to two hours.
And you can see the various percentage,
therefore, for the airports,
a lot of it being centered in the five to
15 minute range.
But if they find something interesting
and if they want to go through a device
search, you're probably looking for more
than one to two hour range.
Now, once you're at a particular airport,
it is national law that is going to
define the rules for
what kind of search is permitted, whether
they're allowed to demand your password.
But there are some fundamental
principles.
The U.S.
Agency for Fundamental Right has
put forth the reasons that would
justify these additional
searches at the border.
Point one is to verify
your identity, where you're
coming from, where your nationality is,
seeing if you're a proper person to be
admitted. And the second reason
would be to search for dangerous objects
like drugs or weapons, or to
see if there's any evidence of criminal
activity and if that last one that is
the most likely one, going to be the
basis for a search of a device
to look for some sort of evidence
to bolster a criminal activity or
in some cases, terrorism.
And which brings us to an example
from the European Union, the United
Kingdom.
Well, there in the European Union for the
time being, where they have
scheduled seven of the Terrorism
Act. And this is a very broad power that
has been granted to the authorities
in the United Kingdom.
It is limited by having a nexus to
terrorism.
And it was also the
UK Court of Appeal found
some limitations under the European
Charter Convention for Human Rights.
This came out of the case involving David
Miranda, who was
traveling between meeting Edward Snowden
in Moscow and Glenn Greenwald
in Brazil, was
detained under Section seven at the
Heathrow Airport and brought a
challenge to that.
The court ultimately did find that the
detention and the interrogation were OK,
but said that the Section seven
did not have sufficient protections
for the right of free expression
because it didn't have the appropriate
exceptions that would allow for
journalists to communicate for sources.
So this shows that while
it is a powerful act, it can be tempered
by the Convention on Human Rights.
However, subsequently
the border police
in the UK have been asserting the
right to demand passwords.
And more recently, about a year ago,
a man by the name of Mohammed Romine
was asked to provide his password.
He refused to provide and was arrested
for that. And earlier this
year, at September, that conviction
was upheld.
He plans to appeal, but this will be a
very important case in sort of
determining whether in the United
Kingdom, they truly do have the power to
invoke this law and for no other
reason than than suspecting they want to
see if there's any terrorism connections,
be able to demand a password and look
through all of your devices.
So turning our sights a little more
broadly around the world, a couple of
countries to to highlight here.
First, in the in the Commonwealth,
Canada and Australia are
both countries that do claim
a right to demand
your passwords and go through your
devices and laptops at the border.
The courts have not yet ruled on whether
this is authorized under those countries
laws.
So at some point there may be a challenge
to test this case.
But in the interim, that's
something that you might face when
passing over these borders.
One thing of note is the Canadian
border police.
They have a policy to restrict
this to information that is on the device
and not on the cloud.
Now, if somebody violates a policy,
usually you don't have much of a remedy
about it. But it is sort of nice to know
that they do have that that policy
and then turning our sights a little bit
more further afield to authoritarian
regimes.
And in this case is that if
they want to search your device at a
border, they probably can do so
with relative impunity.
So if you will be traveling
to, you know, Russia, China,
some of the more authoritarian countries
in the Middle East, in Turkey,
this will be a time to take some of the
more maximum precautions
if you think they have any
reason to go through your devices.
And we'll discuss a little bit how
we might figure that out later,
because these countries may not be
beholden to these international human
rights norms and there might
not be very much that you can do to stop
it. One of the reasons I wanted to
highlight Turkey in here
is that they have detained
up to 75000 people
for having a encrypted messaging app
on their phones simply for having
the app, not because they were accused of
doing anything particular with the app.
This was Baylock was the name
of this messaging app.
And so if you were to travel over that
border and they look through your phone
and found Baylock, that alone could
be a reason for further detention.
So and if you found it and
it was very well discovered, was recently
deleted, that also might be considered
suspicious.
Now, let's turn to the the United States
in the United States these days.
The when you come there, the customs
agents might ask you some questions, like
ask you to unlock your device
to provide a device password
to disclose your social media handles
so they can do public searches
about them.
And how you can react to this depends
a little bit on on who you are.
If you are a U.S.
citizen, then they cannot refuse
entry into the country.
So while they may seize the device,
but ultimately you would be able to
travel on to your destination for a
permanent resident, also
would be able to come into the country.
But there would be a little bit of after
effects because they had raise questions
about whether you'll be able to keep that
status as a permanent resident
and for everybody else here, perhaps the
majority of the room, if you are not
one of these two categories,
you'll be asked these questions in a
situation where if you say no,
they can deny entry until you have to
turn around and go back to where you came
from, which puts a tremendous amount
of pressure to
provide that access and to give up
a little bit of your privacy rights.
So how often is this happening?
Well, at an increasing rate
over the last three years,
they have gone from
under 5000 electronic media searches
to on a pace this year
for over 30000.
So a substantial increase.
The one thing to keep in mind is this is
out of 400 million border
crossings.
So I got a purely statistical level.
The odds are pretty low that a random
person will have their device searched.
But of course, this is not actually
random.
So whether, you know, your particular
odds will will vary.
In addition, the U.S.
has started to undertake
a program called Extreme Vetting.
For the last several years, they have
been collecting social media handles,
alias and search results, and then
providing that to the Customs
and Border Patrol to ask questions
about what they find.
And Donald Trump
has asked the DHS to expand
this program just about a month ago.
And this will expand to looking at things
like your responses in public
hearings, speeches you may have
given at conferences, academic
websites where you may have published a
paper.
And this stuff is considered sort of fair
game to be questioned
about as you cross the border.
And at one time, this was focused on
people who are coming in with immigrant
visas, ones who were planning to stay for
a period of time, but they
have expanded that to more
brief travelers.
So how does this work within the
constitutional and legal framework?
Well, constitutional provisions do apply
at the U.S. border, but there
is this what's known as the border search
exception, the exception that proves
the rule.
Routine searches do not require
a warrant or individualized suspicion,
but non-routine searches
do need an additional level of suspicion.
So what is a non-routine search?
Well, it's defined as something which is
highly intrusive, that impacts
your dignity and privacy interest
or is conducted in a particularly
offensive manner.
So how does that break down with device
searches, electronic searches?
Well, a couple of years ago in 2013,
a court of appeal found that a forensic
search did require this
additional level of legal process.
And this is a forensic search is when
they take your device, hook it up to a
machine, copy
the data on it, do some analytics.
But a manual search, you know, when they
pick it up, flip through it.
Just with the border agent right there
that did not so that was the dividing
line in 2013, but
then in 2014, there's a Supreme
Court case, Riley vs.
California, where the court was looking
at searches of phones.
The government there was arguing that
warrants were not necessary to search the
phones and the court ruled
otherwise. They said that
they recognized that there was a lot of
sensitive data on the phone and that
it wasn't intrusive search that required
a warrant.
And we believe that that precedent
should be applied to border searches.
We filed a case earlier this year,
al-Assad versus Duke, along with the
ACLU, to challenge the warrantless
searches at the border.
The Trump administration has filed a
motion to dismiss our case, which we are
now litigating.
So hopefully we'll be able to use that
case and establish a precedent that
you do need to have additional process to
go through your devices at the border.
And one thing where there has been some
some limited progress is
access to the cloud.
So in the rilly case, the court
recognized the use a great metaphor.
They said the government's argument would
be saying that it's like finding a key
in a suspect's pocket and then arguing
it allowed law enforcement to unlock and
search your house.
And that's actually a pretty good
metaphor for what's on your phone,
because you have a lot of credentials
saved passwords, which
are essentially keys that allow the
phone or your your computer to unlock
information that you have stored
elsewhere on the cloud.
And it shouldn't be because you're
carrying it in your pocket that this
opens up your entire life
to to the investigatory
agent.
And the Customs and Border Patrol has
said as a policy is
only going to look at information that is
physically resident on the device,
keeping in mind that they'll still do
public searches for information about
your social media handles.
Again, like with the Canadians,
this is a policy.
And so that's very important to getting
established as the law, but as a starting
point, at least as good, they have the
policy.
Another important thing to understand
about U.S.
law, and I think this could be applied
elsewhere as well, is the difference
between passwords and fingerprints.
So many devices these days are using
fingerprints as a method of unlocking.
It's very convenient and it does
allow you to
not have to type in your password every
time. It's very convenient.
But the law distinguishes between
passwords because there's a lot of laws
in the United States and actually in many
other countries that provide you with the
right to remain silent and not
answer questions from the law
enforcement. They have to do their
investigations, but you can't be forced
to answer.
And those laws are a basis for arguments.
You don't have to provide your password.
But some cases have found that there are
less protections for the information
that's on your finger.
In addition, besides the different legal
protections, there are some practical
ones. If you're at the border, your
device can be unlocked with a finger.
The border agent could grab your finger
and just shove it down the phone and then
it's unlocked and you'll be arguing later
about whether they should have had access
and whether instead of whether they can
have access.
And finally, it's if they're really
interested, the government may have
access to your fingerprints from other
sources and they may be able to try
and get into the phone using that
information.
So as you're approaching the border,
it's going to think, how should I
approach this, how should it work for me?
And it's going to depend a lot on who you
are and how you
how you want to react to the situation.
So things about who you are, your
citizenship, your residence, your
immigration status will
affect your thinking and what your
chances are of getting searched and how
you react to it.
You're more likely to be
subject to certain, depending on your
travel history. If you've been to
countries that are associated with
terrorism, for example,
your history with law enforcement, you
have an arrest record.
If you have convictions, these will
increase the likelihood of being
subjected to a search.
And then when you're trying to decide how
you would deal with a search, you're
going have to weigh some factors about
your tolerance for hassle and delay
versus your desire to make a statement
and stand up for your rights.
And these can be very tough personal
choices. If you make the decision to
push back on a search, you may
suffer some some consequences that you're
going to have to have to deal with.
The second way that you should be looking
at when you're when you're deciding how
to react to the border and what to do is
think about the information that you're
carrying with you.
How sensitive is that data?
What is the risk that you would
face if the data was seized?
Both the risk that if they if
the government got access to that data
and also your risk of having loss of
access to that.
And if you didn't have a backup, for
example, and you didn't get your device
back, do you need the
information when you get to the far side
of the border or if you
have the information and you can put it
on the cloud, will you be able to get
that information through the network that
will be available on the far side of the
border? The quality both in terms of how
fast they are or whether, like in
some cases, there is heavy government
surveillance on those networks.
So before you arrive at the border,
you've got to think through some of these
issues, you might want to talk with your
employer about your work devices.
They may have policies about whether you
should be taking it over a border, may
ask for some information to be deleted,
may say you should or shouldn't provide
passwords if asked,
and think about protecting what you carry
about. They're going to talk a little bit
more of this when we get to Bill section
talking about technical protections, but
things like backups, encryption, strong
passwords, then think about your
online presence for
for your devices, log
out, remove credentials so that
if they don't have a policy about looking
in the cloud, they would have to at least
require or ask for passwords
before they can do it. So it's tamper
evident in that way.
Also, put yourself in private browsing
mode. So if they're looking through your
Web history, they won't be there.
You also may consider looking
at your publicly available information
and shifting it to private,
making it friends only on Facebook or
going to a private account on Twitter
and most importantly.
Don't bring it if
they don't have it, they can't take it at
the border, so consider leaving
your devices at home if you're not going
to need them.
Maybe you can if you need a computer, but
you don't need your home computer.
Consider bringing a temporary device like
a Chromebook or a burner phone.
If you don't need the data that's on your
device, delete it.
If you do need the data, consider moving
it to the cloud and then picking it up
when you get to the far side.
Then as you come to the border,
it's important as first to plan ahead,
have an idea of what you want to do
there, how you would react to various
scenarios.
So you're not making a decision when
under this very
tough situation where you're under a lot
of pressure of making a decision on the
fly, but have a good idea what you want
to do when you're having the
interactions.
Be polite and respectful.
Escalating the situation can lead
to two further problems that aren't
necessary.
Importantly, don't lie to the
border agents.
There are a lot of countries, probably
almost all will have separate crimes
for giving false information or lying
to governmental authorities.
And that means that they'll have
something over you even
if there is nothing, nothing else they
have for telling something that was
untrue while talking to the border agent,
don't physically interfere with the
search. It's probably not going to work
out. They have a lot of ability to stop
physical interference unless
perhaps you're Jason Bourne
and you're right,
one of them. Well, we'll talk about
consent in a second.
But if they seize your device physically
from you, it's hard to say that you
consented to give it to them so you can
help preserve your rights.
And then if something does happen as it's
going down and you want to do
something about it later, document
it, get names, badge numbers,
agencies, get a receipt for their
property, they'll give you the more power
to do something about it later.
Now, now I want to turn to the consent,
first of all, there's something that
often happens when the border agents are
talking to you.
They'll phrase things in the form of a
polite question.
You know, would you like to give me your
password?
Can I see your device?
And if you hand it over in
response to that, they'll say, oh, it
was consent. You have waived your rights
if you want to challenge it later.
Well, you gave it up.
So in some cases
you might want to clarify.
Well, is that an order?
Am I required to do this or is that a
request? Now, they say it's a request.
No, thank you.
If they say it's an order, well, then
you're going to get to choose your own
adventure.
You can choose to comply with the order.
And this will mean they'll have access to
your device.
You have more limited legal options
later, be more about trying to get them
to delete the data or remove it
from their systems as opposed to not get
it in the first place.
But you'll probably be able to much more
quickly go on your way, make your
connecting flight, go to that conference
that you were going to attend,
or you can refuse to comply.
Stand up for your rights.
And that can provide you greater legal
options. Right, because you can challenge
their ability to and they can challenge
their ability to get into your rights by
not providing the password until has been
adjudicated in a court of law.
But this comes with consequences.
This may escalate the situation.
The device may be seized.
You may have future trouble the next time
you're going over a border.
So these are difficult choices and will
depend on your particular circumstance.
And then after the border,
again, document what has happened
in some if your freedom of information
laws in your jurisdiction, you might want
to use those to get more information
about what happened, see what public
records could be provided.
And another important thing, if
you did make that choice to hand over
your password, change it,
they will keep that password and it will
be available to them for future border
crossings. And if it's a password to
publicly available or, you know,
websites, they may use it to go on there.
So change any passwords that they may
have gotten access to as soon as you get
your as soon as you can.
And with that, I'll turn it over to Bill
to talk a little bit more about technical
measures to protect yourself.
Thanks very much, Kurt.
Yeah, so in addition to the legal
protections that you have at the border,
there are some technical measures that
you can take to protect yourself in
general, as Kurt said,
that the best thing is to not
bring your device with you.
If you don't have your device with you in
the first place and there's no data that
they can get from it.
In addition, you'll have the benefit of
not being able to be contacted by your
boss.
You can also use temporary devices
and that may also provide some
protection. You don't have legal measures
you don't have you don't have your apps
that are installed in your device logged
into various accounts like Twitter
or Facebook.
Then they can force your fingerprint onto
that device and have
your information immediately.
But, you know, if you do choose to
actually bring your device with you,
then there are some things, some measures
that you can take if you do them
right to protect the data that's on
those devices.
So just kind of go into some of the
capabilities, the technical capabilities
that are the border
agents are able to get from your device.
This is a slide from a
company's website called Cellebrite.
And Cellebrite is a forensic analysis
company. What they do is
they, you know, basically create software
for law enforcement to take
Android devices and use the geotag
interface to image those devices and
get data off of them.
Not only do they do this for law
enforcement, where they say right on the
website that they're operating in 100
countries across the world
working with border patrols to do this.
So we know that they're doing this at the
border as well.
And you can see the kind of different
categories is an actual Cellebrite
report that they've generated
from an image from a cell phone.
And, you know, you can this is a
categorized by calendar call
logs, these different things that they
can get from your device after imaging it
and analyzing it.
It's important to kind of look at the
right side of the column because
you can see that there are numerous
categories that have deleted items.
So not only can they get the files,
contacts, events
that you have currently stored on
your device, but they can also get those
that you've deleted in the past.
And we'll go over some protections
against that as well.
So the most powerful thing that you can
do in general to protect your devices
when crossing the border is employing
full disk encryption, it's
an extremely powerful measure
to, you know, have your devices encrypted
as you cross the border in general.
And the important part is that this
protects your data at rest.
It does not protect your data when
you're transferring it over a website.
That's a different mechanism.
So this is encrypting all the files
on your device when you're crossing the
border, although the
device, the devices, files
and you know, it's only as important
as it only as secure
as the power of the passphrase that you
choose to encrypt that device
with.
In most cases, the screen
unlock is a different passphrase
from the from the
full disk encryption passphrase.
So you need to be aware of that.
This is especially true with
desktop devices and not
so much with mobile devices in general.
So certain devices
have this separate code processor
that actually increases the security
that you have at boot time
when you're entering your encryption
passphrase, one of the things that
it can do is it can
basically throttle the number of attempts
that a third party can use when
they're guessing, when they're actually
trying to go through the guesses
of your device passphrase, which can, you
know, lengthen the amount of time that it
takes after each subsequent try
and and slow it down if
you have numerous incorrect
attempts. And also, it can lock the
device after a certain number of tries.
I think with iOS, it's about 10 tries
and make it that device,
you know, not actually capable
of unleashing the contents
and unlocking device.
This is due to a piece of
a code processor that's on
every iPhone since the five is
called the Secure Enclave.
And with the second clave does is
it takes that pain or passphrase that
you have chosen and entangles
it or mixes it
with several different things that are
stored in a secure enclave itself.
These are sources.
This is key material that is stored in
the UID that's burned into the secure
enclave at manufacture time,
as well as a guide, which is
basically flash.
And you can change, but you can't read
the contact contents off of the
secure enclave.
And that's where this kind of
exfiltration resistance property comes
from.
So when you want to choose a good
passphrase, you really want to
look for a strong
pasteurize, is that because these are
critical for actually securing
the device in a proper
way?
In modern situations with modern
hardware, trillions and trillions of
guesses can be tried in a very, very
short period of time.
They use huge word lists and complex
combinatorics to make it so that
they can brute force your passphrase
and get the contents.
So what we recommend is using
five or six random words
in order to choose your
passphrase.
This is pretty resilient against those
brute force attacks.
And again, it can kind of be a very
memorable phrase to you.
You have five or six different words.
Then you can create a story, weave a
story about how that passphrase
works.
A great example is CCDs,
correct horse battery staple
comic that you probably are familiar
with.
In addition, you can kind of look at our
website and get a good list
of diese phrase passwords that
you can use and look into the methodology
of how to generate these phrases.
So with device encryption, there's
a mobile support across the board
for device encryption pretty much at
this point, Android has
implanted partial support since 2013,
Android six point zero
implemented. It's only
if Google Apps are able to basically,
since Android SOC
is an open source operating
system, anyone can take it and implement
it. But if you have Google Apps installed
on that device as a contractual
obligation to to actually
implement secure and
Folder's encryption and iOS has
had it for a long time since
ever since the iPhone 3GS
and iPod touches have it with
a third generation later.
This is kind of what it looks like on
different OEMs.
On the left, we have an
Amazon fire, HD 10,
and on the right we have a five X
device. And you can kind of see that
there are different UX
indicators that your phone has
Foldes encryption.
And in general and desktop OS
environments, you can see that ever
since 2013, this has been widely
supported by Windows
and and Mac OS and
also Linux has had it for a very long
time in most distributions
that's been available ever since the mid
2000s.
So the important thing to know when
you're using this encryption is not
to forget your passphrase,
because if you forget your passphrase, in
most cases, you actually aren't going to
be able to access the data in general
that stored on that device.
Some tools, like a bit longer
on Windows will allow you to
to kind of transfer your passphrase
to windows and
to to let Microsoft know
what it is.
And, you know, that means, of course,
that if you're letting Microsoft know
what it is and they can unlock the
contents of your laptop.
So you should if
you want to use this, keep in mind that
you have to be really comfortable with
Microsoft being able to access all your
data.
One thing that you can do is also turn
off the fingerprint unlock, as Curt
mentioned.
But, you know, one thing that is probably
more effective is actually turning your
device off.
And when you turn on your device off and
then bring it back up, you
can turn it off before you cross the
border, bring it back up when you cross
the border, and it'll prompt you again
for your folder's encryption passphrase
and it'll bypass the, you
know, the screen unlock that in your
fingerprint.
This also means that it's going
to prevent, you know, DMA attacks,
direct memory access attacks or zero
days on screen unlock
programs.
But of course, this really only works if
you have a password set
at all.
And you might remember
this.
So moving on from Foldes, encryption
passphrase is and and
disk encryption, there's also a mechanism
called trusted boot and
it's a way to ensure that the boot
process in general is verified
and trusted by the operating system.
So it goes all the way
from, you know, the pre boot sequence
to the operating system, loading, loading
itself.
And this requires some kind
of a hardware trusted platform module
or equivalent piece of hardware
that's built into the device that's
separate from the CPU.
And this, you know, verify
the boot sequence all the way to the OS
and it can kind of provide this neat
thing called remote attestation
that lets you know as a user
that the boot process has been
secured.
One of the most clever implementations
trusted Vuit was
demonstrated by Trimodal Hudson
last year at C.C.C., and it uses
this thing called trusted platform
module Time-Based
one time password.
And what this does, and this is an
example of it, you have
the seed for the one
time the top that's actually
encoded in the TPM
and then it attached the boot process
generates a one time password, which you
can verify with an Android app
like Google authenticator.
I thought that was a really cool
implementation.
There's mobile support for a trusted
route as well.
There's iOS is low level bootloader,
which which bootstraps iView, which
routes into the operating system itself,
and Android four point four.
And later it's called Verified Bhoot,
and it uses the trusted execution,
environment and Android devices in some
cases where they're available.
So you can check if your device has
this and and is equivalent
to be.
One thing to keep in mind about that,
though, is that software
support for trusted boot
is only available in two
different Android operating systems.
One is Stock Android and two is Copper
Head OS, which has a very high level
of security. If you're using something
like lineage OS, you won't get the
benefits of trust that view.
And on the right here, we have kind of a
graph which shows what the brute process
looks like in these various
different configurations.
And if you've loaded a third party from.
So, you know, entrusted with desktop
support for Windows eight has this thing
called secure, but what's important to
keep in mind about security is that,
well, it's an UNFI standard
that Windows uses and it's not trusted,
but it doesn't secure against
local attackers trusted.
It does Windows eight.
And a security mechanism really doesn't.
And it's not intended to you.
It's good against remote attacks, but
it's not going to
protect you much if you're at the border.
Linux supports various different
destroyer's that have
trusted Bhoot available
for them. You can use self-denying keys
in many cases, but you should check on
your hardware support if it's available
for you. Chrome OS has had this built
in since the beginning and
in the form of it's called verified bude,
just like it's available in Android.
Verified boot has gotten better over time
against local attacks and
Mac OS has secure boot available
on an iMac pro.
But if you're at the border, I-Max
aren't really used
for travel very much unless
you're very audacious.
So security lesin, you can kind of
see the security Legian method that
Elliott on Mr. Robot uses by microwaving
his hard drives.
But if you're not as enterprising as
Eliot and you might want to bring those
devices over the border,
then you can use security.
Leyshon.
And what's important here is that
security Lesin, you know, is
very different from a simple deletion.
You simply delete a file on your hard
drive, then that's not going to do much.
It just change it just erases the lines
around it, saying this is a file.
All the data in those files are actually
still there.
So, you know, border agents have
these complicated forensic tools and even
simple tools can get those files back.
But border agents have things
like Cellebrite, as I mentioned before,
and they can recover the deleted files,
emails, contacts, et cetera.
And so security should be really be used
if you want to remove those files.
And there are various tools that
you can use to do it.
But there are also some caveats.
And, you know, when we're talking
about secure deletion, you think about
things like factory reset or formatting,
factory reset.
It depends. It may or may not
actually remove the data securely
from your device.
It depends on your OS and it depends on
if you have full disk encryption enabled
in the first place.
So that's important to keep in mind.
Factory reset often
doesn't cover things like if you have,
for instance, a SSD
that's entered into your phone
and you do a factory reset, it's not
going to oftentimes delete the data
in that phone. So that's kind of
something that you should keep in mind.
Secure deletion is quite easy on laptops,
but sometimes it's hard to find
tools that work well on mobile
platforms or tablets.
In addition, when you're talking about
USB flash drives,
SSD memory cards and the like,
they implement something called where
leveling, which means that when you're
doing it writes and reads to
those cards the kind of spread
them across the Solid-State.
And that means that the OS has no way
to introspect to learn about
where on the SSD those bytes
are being actually stored.
So they can't you can't use programs
that do you secure deletion on these.
So that's kind of something that, you
know, you can't reliably do for
SSD, memory cards and the like.
You know, when we're talking about
formatting, there are two
definitions of formatting, two different
things when we're talking about there's
something called a high level format,
which definitely does not delete the data
that you want to securely delete.
And then there's low level formatting,
which by and large, will be the data that
we really want to get rid of.
And some of the tools and particular
deletion.
So there's a distinction between the
individual files that you might want to
delete. And then there's free space that
you want to delete.
Linux has tools like scrub and scrub
is good with the dash argument.
If you want to override all the free
space with with 060
out that free space.
And it can also be used for individual
files. Wife is another tool.
But both Linux and Windows
have a utility called Bletch Bot,
which we can delete not
only individual files, but also things
that you might not even think about, like
browser history, thumbnails,
cache of of, you
know, different programs that you have
installed.
So this is this is kind of a good way
to get down to the things that you might
forget about.
But again, it might be imperfect to you
so you can look into how well
it works.
And finally, for mobile devices,
I think that the best thing is to
actually use disk encryption and this
can be used as a kind of a way
to do secure deletion.
So if you have your full disk encrypted,
then you actually, you know, make it
unreadable unless you have, you
know, for instance, that passphrase
often the way that disk encryption works
is that you use a passphrase
to unlock a short esky
in the beginning of a partition
and then, like, go.
And then it actually uses that then to
decrypt the entire drive.
But if you use if you wipe that
decryption key in the beginning of the
drive, then this will
make the data fully unavailable.
So that's one way to actually make
sure that your files are securely
deleted.
This is kind of built into what's called
a factory reset in iOS and also
power wash on Chrome books and
Linux. This can be achieved by formatting
your hard drive and just reinstalling
it from, you know, another copy
of it.
And finally, cloud storage, cloud
storage is a good way to basically
move those vital files off
of the device that you want
to be somewhere else and often
is the case that if you upload it to the
cloud and you have less legal protections
than having it on your device, but when
you're crossing the border, this actually
might be the reverse.
You might have better protections when
you're crossing the border, if you have
your your contents of various
files on the cloud instead.
So this is kind of a process of data
minimization.
And and, you know, you can kind of hide
the files from receiving border guards
and also kind of makes it better
for theft when traveling abroad.
But of course, there is no cloud, there
are just other people's computers.
Any cloud storage, we have risks, you
have the risk of a government coming and
issuing a subpoena to a third
party, to you, to your cloud provider,
and it's them saying fork over the
data and that can be very dangerous.
I can actually get your data to the
government. Hackers don't need a
subpoena. They can just hack into the
cloud servers and get that deal
themselves.
And also, the unfortunate
fact is that most cloud providers only
offer encryption when uploading it
in-transit to, you know,
something like Dropbox.
And it's just sitting there for all
to see in the in the server
side when you have it actually on Dropbox
itself.
So, you know, there are some services
that offer client side encryption
where you encrypt the files on your
local device before ever sending it up to
the cloud.
And this is often called zero knowledge
in the industry as kind of a weird
terminology, because it's different from
zero knowledge, proof that you might need
know from cryptography.
It provides protection against, again,
governments and hackers.
But you should really remember to back up
and remember your key material and
passphrase if you're using this method.
So here's a kind of chart of the
different services that offer
client side encryption and do not offer
it, you'll notice that the most popular
services don't actually offer
clients and encryption.
Then you have to use some of the lesser
known services in order to
really get the best protection
for your cloud backups.
And finally, you can use a self hosted
service like own cloud or next cloud
if you're not trusting cloud services in
general and just want to host your own
way to back up your your files.
And this comes with some, you know,
advantages and disadvantages.
One advantage is that I call it subpena
resilience, which means that you
will have the subpoena come to you
directly so you'll actually know about
it, whereas your cloud service provider
might actually never tell you.
And the other thing is that with
your own cloud and next cloud, they have
a service that allows you to
use client side encryption as of
next cloud 11, which is coming
out in some point next year.
They're going to offer clients any
encryption as a default.
So that's a kind of great way to
protect your data by yourself in a way
that you control.
But one kind of really important
consideration to keep in mind is that you
want a GPS enabled on your server
when you're using these cloud services,
if you're self hosting.
So some of the takeaways from this
is that, you know, best defense is not
to bring your device with you.
You know, you might kind of be a little
bit less stressed out if you just don't
have that device with you in the first
place.
Secondly, if you do choose to,
you know, bring your device with you, use
Foldes encryption, use a trusted
boot, you know, a computer that
enables trusted bruddah, has it built in
and, you know, employ some data
minimization practices
that can offer some powerful full
protections for your data in
general.
So with that, thanks very much.
And I think we're going to turn it over
to you. Questions.
All right. Thank you. Thank you,
everybody.
Well, thank you very much.
That was great advice.
OK, we'll have a short Q&A.
We have about eight minutes,
so.
People queuing up on
the mix.
Here, here you are, sorry, excuse me.
So first one.
Number three, please, one sentence with a
question mark at the end.
Right.
What can you tell us about the devices
being bugged at the border?
So spy programs putting on it?
Yeah. So if you have some kind of a
trusted mechanism, then if they can
get it into the operating system level,
then, you know, some spyware that is
installed, the operating system level,
they can't actually get to you in the
first place.
So that's a good protection.
OK, hang on.
There's a question from the Internet.
Yes, thank you.
Do you think it's a good idea to have
a dummy account or a dummy profile on
a device?
One of the challenges with having a
dummy account or dummy profile is
that in the context of discussing it,
you may be put in a position where you
would be giving false information to the
border agent.
And then if it was discovered that there
was a different account, then
you would have potentially
open yourself up to a penalty for
giving that false information that then
could be used to give tremendous
pressure upon you to access
the rest of the device as you might be
facing some jail time.
OK, let's try the mic on the
left side, please.
You said you you said do not lie to
border agents.
What about claiming I just forgot my
password? And what about saying it's 200?
Correct us on a random sheet of paper I
my bed.
Well, one of the things we do what we do
actually not know your password.
Right. So if you
still stand by, don't lie to the border
agents. But you
if you actually don't know your password,
then you can truthfully say that.
And then perhaps when you get to the far
side, you could have some other mechanism
of getting that 200 character password to
you so you could unlock your device.
So that may enable you to
be truthful about it and not be able to
give up the information.
Keep in mind that if you're in a
situation where if they don't
like your answers, they can refuse
to have you come into the country.
They may do so even though you say you
don't you don't have and they may
not care why you can't give it into them,
but be dissatisfied enough to turn you
away.
OK, thank you.
Over here, please.
There's a deep erasing.
I just wanted to comment that
if you delete your files and then write a
random file over the whole disk, you
will get most of the
solid state data covid
and replaced.
But my actual question is, do you know
if there are already forensic tools
that can retrieve
the data that's stored?
After I've trimmed my data
and it's still on the state side
on the SSD drive, can I read that out
by? Do you mean security delete?
No, no. I mean, when I delete
my files, the trim system
will just tell the SSD
that these blocks are not used anymore,
but they are still set
on the solid state side.
So do you know if forensic
tools can actually ask
the SSD?
Hey, tell me what's hidden there that you
marked deleted, but what you still have
programed in so that I can
retrieve the data.
If that wouldn't be available, then I
wouldn't have to do the extra erase that
are just the extra overwrite that
I just suggested.
Yeah. So I'm not aware
of any tools like that.
One thing to know about SSD is that
they have embedded firmware in them
themselves.
So you can continue to see
an SSD card that actually
kind of accelerates any data
that you write to it, to some kind of
hidden extra partition.
I think Buddy Hwang actually has done a
lot of research on that.
So if you want to look into that, that's
a good place to start.
OK, thank you.
Another question from the Internet,
thank you for just a brief comment and
well-equipped has been missed on your
list of encryption tools.
And then the question, do you know,
is your knowledge Cloud claimed for
a common cloud provider, maybe
even open source, so that we can see
that it actually encrypt?
So for the common
cloud provider that uses client side
encryption, you know,
they're the main ones that you might
have heard of, you know, your whole
family might have heard about don't
really offer it in general.
But if you have a semaphore
and or, you know, if you use Spider
Oaks programs and they are
kind of well vetted
system for doing client side
encryption, backup backups
on the cloud.
OK, thank you.
One more question on the left side here.
So my question is less
technical, maybe more legal.
I was wondering regarding
being careful about consent and
kind of choosing your own adventure,
is there a distinction,
any meaningful distinction between
complying with a search and consenting?
Can you say? You know, I understand
that you're ordering me to submit
a password and submit a phone.
I'm going to comply with that
under, you know, under duress, not
not consenting to keep your legal options
available in the future.
Yeah, I think there there are
important distinctions. And I think in
the truth is, even if somebody
gives what appears to be consent under
the circumstances, there's actually some
pretty good arguments that that's not a
freely given consent.
You're under tremendous pressure.
You're being kept away from
other forms of communications.
It is a situation in which the
custom agents have tremendous power over
you.
And so I think that even if
you if you said, you know,
I'm not consenting, but here you go,
you could certainly argue that that
wasn't consent.
And I think there are circumstances and
we like, fine, you know, you
could say that you weren't really
consenting to that.
But the more clearly you say
that you're not consenting or the
more clearly you clarify
whether it is a request or an order
that could help your situation later,
especially if you are able to clarify
that it is just a request and thereby
say no.
We'll take one final question
just before all the frustration
breaks out.
Kurtz and Williams said they'll be
at your fifth stand, which
is in level plus one on the
scale.
So if you people have questions
going after will take.
Sorry, one final question on
the right side.
Yes. Adding on top of the
dummy account question, I'd like to ask
if you can recommend a program that
automatically does which death accounts
based on which password I enter into
my device.
Yeah. So a plausible deniability
kind of schema.
I believe that there are those givens out
there, but I think it probably
has an opinion about whether you should
use them or not.
I mean, as I say, the same issue as
before. You're you're taking a risk by
trying to do that. And that is the risk
that if that is discovered, that is
really suspicious to them and
so that that highly escalates the matter.
So you're you're trading off this
possibility that you'll be able to
appear to be cooperative
and not have them access to
the the true information against
the possibility that
they discover that something funny is
going on, you know, after they put it
through the Cellebrite or whatnot.
And see, there's a lot of data that
they're not able to access and then
the consequences ratchet
up. So I think that
it's a relatively
high risk if something goes wrong,
that it will be treated as a very
suspicious person.
Know that there is another software
that Backtrack uses
that if you enter certain parts like
blocks passphrase, then it'll instead
delete the contents of your device
again and not at the border.
They would find that extremely
suspicious.
Just saying it's out there.
OK, thank you.
I'm afraid we have to close this now.
Let's give a final big hand for
Kirkup and William
you.
Thank you, everybody.