What is important when traveling regarding security?
People who travel often internationally are common targets.
It can be economic espionage.
Countries have practice to go after specific intellectual properties.
Due to the war on terrorism gives increased security concerns
It is cheaper than ever to fly internationally.
People often travel with too many devices putting them at high security risk.
Risky travel points
International travel
Travel schedule known by third party
Travels organized by third party could be invites to conferences.
What defines a high risk traveler?
People traveling on their own
Employment at an organisation
People that have a history of being a target
Places of risk common target areas
Coffee shops
Airports
Specific countries
Going to specific countries
Techniques attackers can use
Passive network attacks sniffing
Physical non destructive access, copying the laptop image
Active network attacks remote hacking
Physical modifications tampering with devices
Multi touch physical modifications
Captive portals
What can they get in an attack
All current data
Historical data
Future access data leak in the future
What is the consequences of compromise
- Sensitive data lost
- Criminal liability or imprisonment
- Commercial win for the attacker
- Property destruction or loss of data
- Disruption DoS
- Lives at risk
Safe places to travel
- Higher risk North Korea
- High Risk Conflict zones example Syria
- Border line risk US/EU to Russia
- China target of espionage
- border line low risk EU people visiting us
- internal us travel
Minimize the risk of compromise
- Have protection from basic attacks strong passwords
- Limit information carrying risk at exposure
- If being taken for question. Dont piss of in countries
- Use good technology for protection
- Saved usernames and passwords in browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Edge which can be revealed
- Device confiscation at travel points.
Techniques
- Larger organisations have a travel pool of hardware
- Limit travel gear
- Hardening mobile devices such as IOS, Android.
- Hardening MacOS X, Windows, Linux
- Minimize data on the machine (Such as emails, data,
- The user can be forced to give over device and passwords or risk penalty.
- Travel naked with no data on the laptop. Once at destination then download
encrypted data.
- Dont bring a device with passwords, credentials with it.
- Dont bring a device that has login access to production systems.
- Dont have personal accounts on a work machine. Twitter, Facebook, Email logins.
- Deploy a secure VPN and backup VPN.
-
Satellite Internet
- Reveal GPS location
- Very expensive per megabyte cost
- Blocked in specific locations
What is not recommended
- Chromebooks are problematic due to the dependence on Google services must be available.
- Special advanced hardware will result in extra scrutiny.
- Special security equipment like special routers can show the target as secure aware and increase the scrutiny
- Desktop as a service can be slow and unreliable
- Free / Low cost Public VPNs often are blocked.
- Full disk encryption. Can be forced to decrypt and show you have data which is of interest.
- Too complicated systems might result in failure.
- Some countries block devices with strong encryption can result in confiscating equipment.
What is recommended
- Having fully charged devices eg. laptop/phone/tablet that can power on when being requested.
- Better VPN / Tor
- Your own third party VPN
- DaaS Better Desktop as a Service
- Move the server closer to the location where traveling to.
- Improve laptops security.
- Disposable laptops that can easily wipe all data and restore to default.
- BIOS options to show if has been opened up.
- Cheap paper seals that can reveal if it has been opened up.
- Better secure phone with less access to sensitive data. |
