On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 5:05 AM William Kenworthy <[email protected]> wrote: > > It also makes the point that any adminstrator will have access to the sticks > data - not just the user (same as root under Linux).
This is just a fundamental issue about how computers work. If you attach your storage media to a computer, then potentially anybody who had either physical access or administrative access to that computer before you can read the storage media. If it is encrypted and you enter the decryption key into the computer, then that includes the encrypted data too. There are of course operating systems that try to make this sort of thing harder, but there are many ways to bypass this sort of thing at either the hardware or software level. If you are plugging your USB drive into a computer you don't control, you really have no way to know what hardware or software it is using. It could contain hardware keyloggers, the OS might be tampered with, if the device is supposed to prevent OS tampering you don't know if the hardware was swapped out with hardware that doesn't prevent tampering, and so on. This is why things like hardware password/key managers often implement a minimalistic serial/keyboard interface - to prevent the host they are plugged into from actually being able to directly access their secure storage. I realize that you already said that this is your own hardware - I just wanted to point out this fundamental limitation. This is one of the reasons that when I select laptops/tablets I tend to select ones that are very light/portable - the more likely I am to have it with me the less likely I am to need to access my private data from systems I don't control. -- Rich
