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

lapjacking

[Skapare]

And once the codes to do this leak into the wild, laptop hijacking and ransoms will be next.

well

[scapermoya]

aside from the security risks, this can only become an effective deterrent if it sees widespread use.
good luck with that.

Re:well

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that this is less about deterrent and more about mitigating data loss. Laptops are cheap(and, given that this hardware and service aren't exactly going to be free) the cost of replacing some when they get stolen is probably lower than building all sorts of fancy features into them. Being able to nuke the data on the system(specifically, nuke the crypto keys to the disk's already encrypted contents) could be well worth the money for a fairly broad swath of business type purposes.

Government backdoor

[Lead Butthead]

The question is if this... feature has a government backdoor to 'assist' in 'terrorism investigation.'

Re:horrible idea

[tomhudson]

It'll become a source for used/spare parts. Need a battery? A charger? A new screen because you left your lappy on the car roof and drove off? A new keyboard because you spilled crap on it? A bigger hard drive? Extra ram? A new case? A spare drive caddy and connector? A cheap DVD/Blu-Ray upgrade?

The easily-disposed-of parts of a disassembled laptop are worth as much as the whole lappy.

Re:horrible idea

[SanityInAnarchy]

I mean yeah it's supposed to stop people from stealing your much more valuable personal data but that should be password protected anyway with a directory hider/protector (not like a compressed archive file with a password cuz that's too slow) so why bother?

Your ignorance is showing...

Compressed archive files are plenty fast, depending on what you're trying to protect. The real problem is, what happens when you "open" them? Most of the time, it'll be unpacking them to a temporary directory, opening them with some random program on your (unencrypted) hard drive (likely without anything to prevent it from being swapped out, so now your stuff is on disk in the clear twice), saved back to the temporary folder (three times, if you're still counting), and put back into the archive.

Plus, there's now a mention in Recent Documents, and all kinds of other information letting people know, at the very least, that you have some encrypted files, and what their names are.

This applies to Truecrypt also, by the way, unless you're using it for fulldisk encryption.

And if you're encrypting the whole disk -- where will you keep the encryption keys? How will you boot? Doing it in hardware suddenly makes sense -- probably a slight performance boost, also.

And once you're doing that, having a way to remotely destroy the crypto keys also makes sense -- if you're paranoid enough to encrypt your whole hard drive, this is the next best thing to putting thermite in the case and triggering that remotely instead.

It's not a deterrent, it's a way to make the crypto much more secure.