One piece of advice, carrying on from the previously suggested "purchase randomly chosen stick from a randomly chosen store", never use a stick given to you as a gift or promo. It's not unknown for trade show giveaways to contain malware (either accidentally when the trade show vendor was copying their sales brochures to the stick, or something more sinister).
Andy - Sent from my email machine -----Original Message----- From: "nb.linux" <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Thu, 02 Jan 2014 23:33:27 To: <[email protected]> Reply-To: User support for Tails <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Tails-support] usb flash drive Thomas Benjamin: > Sorry! > > I don't know enough about USB thumb drives to answer those questions. > Perhaps someone else on this list can? > > Thumb drives with user flashable firmware are rare, however one should > still always be suspicious of any drive ordered through the mail. It is > better to go to a randomly chosen store and buy a randomly selected thumb > drive. > > > On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 5:01 PM, heath bunting > <[email protected]>wrote: > >> On Thu, 2 Jan 2014, Thomas Benjamin wrote: >> >> Yes. They contain firmware that can potentially be flashed by the user >>> and / or an adversary depending on the model. >>> Be aware, of course, that even if you get a model that cannot be flashed >>> by a user, if you get it by mail the adversary can still modify or replace >>> the >>> firmware before it before it gets to you. We know that the NSA does this. >>> >> >> so would you recomend a usb flash drive that allows the user to flash the >> firmware ? >> >> if so, what open firmware should be flashed upon it ? >> >> and which models of usb flash drive can you suggest ? An example: I just opened the case of a USB thumb drive (give-away from my bank.. ha ha) that has an IC from ALCOR MICRO, CORP. [1] on it, but I cannot yet read the exact IC name. On the website are various ICs (*) that "Support firmware upgrade mechanism (ISP, In-System Programming)". So apparently, there are upgrade mechanisms, but I don't know whether they are usable via USB or just via the electrical interface etc. [1] http://www.alcormicro.com/en_content/index_en.php (*) also for SD Cards; reminds me to 30c3 talk... Cheers! _______________________________________________ Tails-support mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.boum.org/listinfo/tails-support _______________________________________________ Tails-support mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.boum.org/listinfo/tails-support
