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Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

I've got friends who work at places where company policy says that any electronics you travel to China with can never be connected to the corporate network again.

They don't destroy the devices, but all travel phones/laptops are "burners" and get given away instead of ever used for work again.

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Every company I've worked with with business in China or Russia does this. Same rule was implemented last year when there was a ban on laptops on flights to/from Iran and the other Muslim majority countries the US put travel restrictions on, despite being UK based.

The devices aren't given away however, they're just wiped and reused as burners. Not 100% secure as a nation state would have access to BIOS rootkits but it's better than nothing.

X-ray and check flash content, also use tamper-evident seals (glitter nail polish) on internal parts.

care to go into more detail about the glitter/nail polish? I've heard of the "straw" technique[1], flour/baby powder by the door, but never this stuff.

(chucking a random assortment of straws on top of your laptop then taking a photo, with the idea that it will be more difficult/time consuming/impossible to recreate exactly like in the photo).

Same thing as the straws basically: paint glitter over screws and such, take a picture.

Seems utterly bizarre considering all of those devices must have come from China in the first place...

But they're _probably_ not installing exploits on the entire logistics chain "haystack, at least not exploits with the level of sophistication they'd use on a high-value "needle" with an evil maid (or an evil customs inspector) attack.

Also - the Australian Government banned the NBNCo from using any Huawei gear in out National Broadband Network. Sadly that's _probably_ either just racist political point scoring, or effective lobbying (or outright bribery) from the non-Chinese based network gear companies - rather than any real intent to improve security based on evidence from people/organisations capable of making that sort of determination...

Why? Couldn't you just format the drives if you were that paranoid? Are they worried about some kind of hardware bugging or sub OS exploits while the owner is not looking?

Quite simply yes. A modern "computer" is made up of multiple layered CPUs and OSs at this point. WiFi, sound, ssd, GPU all often have embedded cpu and firmware that could get "enhanced" and survive a recore

Hell - even the _batteries_ have embedded cpus and firmware...

https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-19/dc-19-presentations/...

(Note slide 116 there - about 7 up from the end: "Attacking the OS kernel")

https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2099616/black-hat-charlie-mi...

http://www.karosium.com/2016/08/smbusb-hacking-smart-batteri...

In the end, if it runs code, you cannot trust it.

You could reformat the drives but what if someone has infected the firmware on the drive?

Check out: https://www.malwaretech.com/2015/04/hard-disk-firmware-hacki...

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