weird physical security idea - possible?

[papillon87]

Hi there, this is my first post here, after looking through these forums I figured this might be the best place to ask about an idea I had.

First off, I know there might be easier, cheaper ways to do this, but I wanted to see if this way is at all possible, and if so how to go about it. Secondly this would only protect against physical operation of the system which is all I require, I understand that hackers or people who physically steal the hard drive could get into stuff on the system.

OK, so I have a computer that I don't trust people around, I don't want like my parents or my siblings (when they visit) messing with it at all. However I don't want to have to be bothered with a password everytime I need to use the machine.

The solution I came up with is thus: Ideally there would be a 7-switch DIP switch wired to the motherboard that could be set to any ASCII character. At POST upon receiving the right ASCII character the system would boot into the OS. Any other character would fail the boot. Alternatively you could have a few characters set to different OS, so if you wanted to use Windows flip the switches to one character, Linux another etc... The system would only check for the character at boot, after which operation (provided the correct character was recieved) would resume as normal.

My question, is there any sort of easy way of doing this on the software side? What does changing the BIOS for this capability entail?

Again I know this is probably a pretty goofy idea with a hundred better alternatives but once I had this idea in my head I kept on thinking about it and I decided to check with those in the know to see if it's viable.

Thanks for reading this!

 

[A5]

Soldering an extra DIP bank to the board and then hacking the BIOS to support this would probably take more time than the sum total of every time you entered the OS password over the life of the system .

And this isn't really secure, since anyone with time would eventually defeat it unless you have it set to nuke your system after n failed attempts. Even a basic, unique dictionary word password (that you could type in under a second with muscle memory) at the OS level would be significantly better for this purpose than a single-char BIOS password.

 

[phasseshifter]

use a key lock switch

 

[papillon87]

ok i was just wondering

Thank you!

 

[Blain]

My question, is there any sort of easy way of doing this on the software side

Again I know this is probably a pretty goofy idea...

Thanks for reading this!

Yes it is a goofy idea, with a much better solution... Use a password.

A password would not protect against "physical operation of the system".
They could still reboot the system and run some Live Linux off a USB drive.

 

[Micrornd]

Unplug it and tell them it is broken.

99% will believe it :thumbsup:

 

[DrPizza]

Get a second hard drive to store your porn sensitive documents on. Unplug that hard drive when it's not in use. No one would ever know there's an E:drive, unless they opened up your case.

 

[Mark R]

Not a useful idea. A 7-pole dip switch only has 128 combinations. Even if you got this to work, it would only take an attacker who had found the switch, a maximum of 128 boots to get in.

Much easier to use a BIOS password. You can take this a fair bit further by then setting a HDD password in the BIOS. Once the HDD is locked, it will not be detectable unless the BIOS sends the correct password to the HDD. Note that this type of HDD password may only be supported by "workstation" or "enterprise" level motherboards, as this type of security feature is widely used by businesses to prevent data theft/industrial espionage.

If you have a BIOS user password, then the BIOS will fail the boot, if the wrong password is entered. Only if the right password is entered, will the BIOS unlock the HDD. The HDD cannot be transferred to a new motherboard without the HDD password, because without the HDD password configured in the BIOS, the HDD will not be detected.

 

[John Connor]

The thing about ideas is that once someone gets one in their head and they think it's a good idea they will go to the ends of the earth no matter how insignificant, meaningless or irrelevant that idea is. They will spend thousands of dollars! I've seen it before. I am an amateur inventor and keep a book on all my drawings. When I was 12 I had an idea about a cell phone with a pull out keyboard. Now they got them. They are called smartphones. It only happened about twenty years latter. ROFL! Anyway...

If your BIOS supports an ATA password for the hard drive use that. Anyone that removes the HDD will have to enter the password and/or the HDD just won't be accessible. Or take it up a notch and encrypt the drive. That's what I have done. Read my post here in my blog about that. http://blog.systechforum.net/?p=36

Or, to use the simple approach that you want and not use a password, wire the motherboard main connector wires green and black to an electric key switch. When the green and black wires short it starts the computer. Hide the key.