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Comment by Cenk | Hacker News Reader

You could buy an Apple Watch and use that to unlock your Mac based on vicinity: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206995 Only works on newer MacBook though.

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I can confirm this setup works quite well. Initially it was a bit hit/miss whether it would unlock, but they clearly fixed something, it's much better now.

I had very little luck trying to set this up, and it required me to switch to a different second factor authentication that ended up complicating my life for everything else. Do Not Recommend.

1. enter company you don't work at and steal laptop at lunch hour

2. walk to cafeteria with laptop that looks like any other. let owner watch unlock it for you.

3. profit!

4. optional, return laptop before lunch is over for full stealth.

Worth noting that the watch alerts that it has been used to unlock the laptop. Doesn't prevent the action, but does prevent "stealth mode unlock"

only if it is reported.

Most people will just ignore it and call a fluke. Just like everyone does when their servers signatures changes. everyone just save the new key and type their passwords away ;)

There are a lot of attacks one can imagine when you have physical access to hardware inside the building. Why not just boot to a thumb drive and install malware?

Because the computer is locked?

If they don't have full disk encryption, booting a mac holding command and R will get you into recovery mode where you can change the root password, or change the boot device to something that simply doesn't care about the login permisions. Pretty much any machine without full disk encryption at rest is vulnerable when you have physical access. And if they do, you can still probably do a lot of damage, without Bumping into someone at lunch with their laptop.

Not saying it's not a real vector, but it's hardly one that would keep me up at night.

There have been successful attacks on locked macs via the thunderbolt port.

I'm thinking of one in particular which I can't find at the moment, but I remember seeing a really fantastic video where one guy described in detail how he reverse engineered the mac thunderbolt interface and was able to flash malware bootcode on to it even when locked. Once that malware was installed, it could do pretty much anything, including get encryption keys to your hard drive, intercept all keystrokes, etc.

If anyone has a link to that, please post it here.

Also, there this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7123121

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