Booting encrypted

[Frank Knobbe]

On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 15:22, Steve Watt wrote:
> Having the password compiled in to something that's necessarily clear-text
> on the same media?

Sorry for being late... I'm still catching up on piles of email :)


Instead of having a plaintext password on the same media, how about a
mechanism that reads the CPU's serial number, or some other hardware
dependent number that can not be read by users on a system. If the drive
gets removed from the system, the attacker would have a challenge.

Of course you have to be careful before you replace failed hardware that
is used to derive the key :)  Don't replace the failed CPU before you
decrypted... no wait... uhm...   :)   Okay, how about an offline copy of
the number in case of hardware failure... :)

Seriously though, tying the boot process to a hardware dependent value
that is not accessible from within the booted system might be something
to consider. 

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Frank

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