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06.15.09 Running Your Mac Book From An SD Card  By Dan Morrill Booting your Apple Mac Book just got tons easier, and easier for forensics or people who have locked themselves out of their computers. Boot up in a fresh image off your SD Card, and the whole drive system is all yours to do things with. While this might look bad on the surface, booting a box off a CD, DVD or even USB stick is nothing new. What makes this totally interesting for apple is that for all intents and purposes without a way to encrypt a hard drive, it is going to be trivially easy for someone to boot to an image on the SD card, and then move data off the main hard drive to any other drive they want. Since you are booting off your image, passwords, meh, you got them already. According to a fresh Knowledge Base article, a properly formatted SD card can be used to boot OS X from the internal slot. As (vaguely) described, this could be a valuable backup and restoration tool, or a convenient way to maintain a semi-portable install of your OS. In proper giveth/taketh fashion, Apple states in the same posting that, despite being the clear, inevitable replacement for the SDHC standard, SDXC cards won't be supported, meaning storage will effectively be capped at 32GB. Source: Gizmodo
For the geeky folks, this is very cool for data recovery, being able to bypass the main drive and grab data that someone might have locked themselves out of. For forensics, government inspectors, or anyone else with physical access to the box, this will make examining the hard drive very easy. While there is hard drive encryption for an Apple computer, my experience is that they are clunky and not hard to use, but hard to understand what they are doing. This makes the job of physically securing the Apple computer much more interesting for corporate environments. Great for mom and dad, great for people who have physical access to the box, not so great for information security. Comments About the Author: Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management. Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through his blog, Managing Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the ITtoolbox blogging community. |
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