On 11/06/2013 04:21 PM, Matt Johnson wrote:
Sorry Eugen, I am still not getting it. You will author content in isolation, without reference to any information at all? Or perhaps in a library with books on paper? When I author something I constantly refer to other material.
You know most computers come standard with harddrives where you can store documents and stuff. It's kind of like the cloud, except on your own computer and without a requirement to agree to an incomprehensible, probably-evil ToS.
Lets say you write something, then burn it to CD and transfer it to a networked system and send it out. Isn't it now subject to traffic analysis and perhaps malware injection?
It's not subject to malware injection if it's signed with a Bitcoin key, or a PGP key, etc.
It's not necessarily subject to traffic analysis if one distributes it over Tor. But even if the non-air-gapped machine running Tor gets pwned with a zero-day or some other type of attack through the internet, the attacker does not get the Bitcoins/PGP private key, etc., because those things are only found on the air-gapped machine.
It is only secure if you author it and never move it from the air gaped computer.
See above. Even so, you seem to be ignoring the most important use cases where the reference material is only stored on the air-gapped machine. I'd assume that's how the journalists reporting on the Snowden leaks work. (Or at least they should.)
If you take Griffin's point that connecting a USB stick, or external hard drive is dangerous, and that PDFs are dangerous then I don't think you can do much with that air gaped computer. I am asking a serious question, what are realistic use cases for an air gaped computer?
Protecting leaked documents and Bitcoin tokens are the two most obvious cases. Essentially any case where you cannot afford for the data to get stolen, but where it's impossible or impractical to use non-digital media like paper.
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