But there are various ways this could go wrong: there can be bugs in the code that does the verification, attackers could connive to get their code marked as trustworthy, or malicious code could be inserted after the bootloader. Some laptops, for example, offer “secure boot” through a special tamper-resistant chip called a Trusted Platform Module, which tries to ensure that the computer’s bootloader code hasn’t been modified to be malicious. Haven is an external solution to a problem computer makers traditionally attempted to handle from within their devices. With that noted, I’ll be forthright about the product’s flaws below, and have solicited input for this article from people not involved in the project.Īlso collaborating on Haven is the Guardian Project, a global collective of mobile security app developers. I sit on the FPF board with Snowden, am an FPF founder, and lent some help developing the app, including through nine months of testing. Snowden is helping to develop the software through a project he leads at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which receives funding from The Intercept’s parent company. The first public beta version of Haven has officially been released it’s available in the Play Store and on F-Droid, an open source app store for Android. Haven uses the smartphone’s many sensors - microphone, motion detector, light detector, and cameras - to monitor the room for changes, and it logs everything it notices. The NSA whistleblower and a team of collaborators have been working on a new open source Android app called Haven that you install on a spare smartphone, turning the device into a sort of sentry to watch over your laptop. If I come back and continue to use my compromised computer, the attacker could gain access to everything.Įdward Snowden and his friends have a solution. My disk is encrypted, but all it takes to bypass this protection is for an attacker - a malicious hotel housekeeper, or “ evil maid,” for example - to spend a few minutes physically tampering with it without my knowledge. It contains sensitive information messaging app conversations, email, password databases, encryption keys, unreleased work, web browsers logged into various accounts, and so on. Like many other journalists, activists, and software developers I know, I carry my laptop everywhere while I’m traveling.
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