Re: [Tails-dev] Tails: pcmcia / firewire / etc.

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Author: alan
Date:  
To: tails-dev
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] Tails: pcmcia / firewire / etc.

Hi,

We didn't reach a conclusion on this topic. The page on pcmcia is still
tagged "discuss".

Issue: 32bit PCMCIA gets DMA. It is thus usable by an adversary for
external bus memory forensics on a running Tails.

Question: we now have to discuss what usability vs.
security balance we want.

Ideas:

* If a firewire card was inserted into the slot and the bus is active,
pop up a dialog and ask "hey, you want to use firewire/etc.?"
* disable these buses by default, allow opt-in through tails-greeter
to enable
* ask that users assert they want to use this or that bus, and make
the assertion bind to a single device, rather than all devices
blindly
* de-activate PCMCIA and ExpressCard on systems that don't have any
PCMCIA or ExpressCard devices after running for 5 minutes. This is
going to byte some users, but probably only the first time.

This is related to [[https://tails.boum.org/todo/disable_expresscard__36__]]

Please give your thoughts.

Cheers


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