Hacker News Reader

Comment by thibaut_barrere | Hacker News Reader

I know that creating a guest account as a honeypot is the recommended technique, but I wonder if there are (Mac OS X) vulnerabilities to get access to your main account from the guest account (in which case full disk encryption would not protect the data).

I guess in the end it boils down to: do you prefer to leak the data, or lose your laptop ? :-)

View on HN

The built-in guest account runs on a separate copy of the OS, booted from the recovery partition. It is a limited OS image that only runs Safari.

A normal account would require unlocking the disk, which would expose everything.

Last time I looked at Prey (over a year ago) it didn't support installation to the recovery partition. But they may have added support since then.

If you're already relying on OS X's FDE, it's not a huge step to link your laptop with iCloud. You can then do basically all the things you can do with a lost iOS device: beep, send messages, or wipe it (instantaneously if FDE is on, it just clears the keys).

Out of curiosity, could you explain why creating a guest account as a honeypot is the recommended technique? My first guess would be to help identify who has the machine.

If there's no way to use the computer the thief will instead wipe the disk making it impossible to track.

if you don't need a login to use your laptop, then a guest account is not needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com