Ericsson and Intel Offer Remote Notebook Lockdown

MojoKid writes "Ericsson and Intel have announced that they are collaborating on a way to keep your laptop's contents safe when your laptop goes MIA. Using Intel's Anti-Theft Technology — PC Protection (Intel AT-p) and Ericsson's Mobile Broadband (HSPA) modules, lost or stolen laptops can be remotely locked down. Similar to Lenovo's recently announced Lockdown Now PC technology, the Ericsson-Intel technology uses SMS messages sent directly to a laptop's mobile broadband chip. Once the chip receives the lock-down message, it passes it to the Intel AT-p function, which is integrated into Intel's Centrino 2 with vPro technology platform. Unlike Lenovo's anti-theft solution, the Ericsson module includes GPS functionality as well."

Comments

Re:lapjacking

[afidel]

If it's like Lenovo's solution you have two levels of authentication, first the SMS number which sent the message is whitelisted (fairly easy to spoof I assume) and secondly the messages are cryptographically signed. I believe the whitelist feature is to keep from being DDOS'd with bogus messages which the card would have to attempt to decrypt.

It's a good idea, but...

[MrCrassic]

It won't solve for another problem: losing the computer in an area without signal (like a train).

If the thief is smart (which is normally not the case), he can remove the hard drive right on the train or in that same area and completely avoid the SMS message. Unless, of course, the SMS can somehow be sent to the security chip without the interference of an operating system.

When I lost my Treo in the subway, the Good administrator for my hosted email service could not remote wipe the phone because it could never find service. It's possible that someone removed the SIM right away, but I'm sure that I lost it while getting off the train.

Nonetheless, it's a great idea that covers many other common circumstances. Fortunately, most thieves are petty thieves and wouldn't know that this module is there in the first place.

Re:The hard drive maybe

[afidel]

Taking the HDD out gains you NOTHING, in theory it's already fully encrypted with 256 bit AES which is uncrackable by any currently known method. The idea is that there is only one real vulnerability in a TPM based system and that is the TPM chip's keystore and the databus that the TPM chip uses to talk to the CPU, if you erase the keystore and thus makes sure that both those pathways are neutralized there should be no possible way to retrieve the data off the disk. There's still the cooled RAM trick and possibly a trace of the key left in the disk controller's cache, but those are both VERY sophisticated attacks that have a very low chance of working even in lab conditions. Oh and I just thought of something, if the TPM keystore is wiped then the TPM trust web collapses and the machine should reboot thus flushing the key from ram.