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Comment by luser001 | Hacker News Reader

So you shut down your computer (as opposed to suspending it) every time you transport your computer from home to office and vice versa etc?

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Absolutely. My previous laptop was a Macbook that I used to just suspend to RAM. When I decided to start taking my security/privacy seriously I decided I would start shutting down my machine when not in use. Even though TRESOR keeps my encryption key out of RAM, my RAM is still going to contain sensitive information when suspended. I can't suspend to disk because I've disabled swap. I did this because I use an SSD and wanted to avoid unnecessary wearing.

I suspected that I might be frustrated by having to boot up my machine every time I use it, because I'd become accustomed to suspend to ram. It hasn't turned out that way. It doesn't bother me at all.

What's so unusual about that? I almost never suspend my laptop.

I almost never shut it down. Probably only once a month.

Waking from sleep is faster and I don't have to re-open my applications and documents. Shutting it down would save a small amount of power but that's rarely an issue (I'd shut it down if I was flying somewhere).

Are there some benefits to shutting it down I'm overlooking?

With SSD, on OSX, it's pretty fast to reboot. Most OSes can now be tuned to boot very quickly; the big thing was getting rid of the BIOS for EFI I think.

If you suspend, you are vulnerable to reading decryption key from RAM (firewire, ram freezing). If you are doing full disk encryption, then only shutdown or hibernate are secure.

My encryption key doesn't live in RAM because I use TRESOR. It's hidden in the debug registers of my CPU. There is still going to be other sensitive information in RAM though which I wouldn't want to be accessed.

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