Would it be permissible to wipe your phone before going through customs to get back into the US? If they ask to search your already wiped phone, you aren’t destroying any evidence.
Would it be permissible to wipe your phone before going through customs to get back into the US? If they ask to search your already wiped phone, you aren’t destroying any evidence.
There are apparently problems with wipe/restore under GrapheneOS:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060780>
(From the HN GrapheneOS account about a month ago.)
It has an encrypted backup/restore system.
We were talking about an attacker taking an image of the SSD prior to it being wiped not helping them because information needed to derive the key encryption keys is gone from the secure element. It similarly doesn't help them to do a brute force on a server farm since they're rate limited by the secure element. It only allows 20 attempts and has rapidly increasing delays between those. There's also hardware bound key derivation but that only helps improve the strength of a decent password. The secure element rate limiting makes even a random 6 digit PIN highly insecure unless an attacker can exploit the secure element.
Thank you!
(Very much appreciate your active participation here.)
That link says you can't take a image of the disk prior to wiping.
OP is talking about just backing up what you need off-phone and then wiping it.
What problems are you referring to?
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49394193>
Yes. Of course it is permissible. It is your device. The wipe must have completed before arriving at the counter.
I wouldn't assume that to be the case. It's illegal under federal law to destroy evidence of a crime. Just what the government needs to do to show that you've destroyed evidence of a crime and not just the sexting you did with your girlfriend is a pretty murky area of law, from what I can tell.
I would not present a phone to customs that had clearly just been wiped.
You're speaking nonsense since there was no charge or warrant against him. There was no crime that was committed. People are free to use their phone for f sake. People who reason as poorly as you will lead to all remaining rights being lost.
The way he wiped it is legal for the same reason. It was an illegal search and he was under no obligation to preserve the data on his phone.
It's legal to refuse to provide a PIN/password in the US. He's a US citizen so they couldn't refuse him entry. If he wasn't then the result would be getting deported.
It likely would have been a much better decision to refuse to provide the PIN/password and rely on the encryption and device security instead. He could have done a reboot or shutdown in advance but even without that it would have done it automatically via the locked device auto-reboot timer. The secure element only allows 20 attempts for key derivation with rapidly growing delays between those. If he had a strong passphrase then even a secure element exploit wouldn't obtain the data protected by it.
Ah, I see where you've gone wrong. You're expecting to apply common sense and reason to the law.
That kind of thinking has landed a whole lot of people in prison.
You're losing track of the discussion which was about erasing data before arriving at the counter. In any event, if you're so willing to "bend over" to the man, please try not to take others down with you.
I did not, in fact, lose track of that point. I was merely pointing out it's not a solution. I'm sure the guy in the topic article thought he had things figured out, too.
You know how they say ignorance of the law is no excuse? That holds true even if the law seems unreasonable or incomprehensible.