# Anti-theft ideas

## Saundersx

I was thinking, there has been a rash of breakins in the area I live and this computer is what I do my work on. I was thinking of making a way I could locate it after the fact. I haven't actually started making anything yet, I'm looking for ideas before I start.

Here is what I am thinking.

- buy a cheap usb wifi, plug it in internally to the motherboard (this is a desktop). As soon as the system finishes booting it starts scanning for the first open network, connects, uses dyndns, connects to something that msgs my phone (or something to that effect), reverse-tunnel-ssh, the possibilities here are endless really. Hell just by the fact it's scanning I could pick it up on a laptop driving around and know it's mine by the mac address, perhaps allowing ad-hoc in this situation as well.

- have a microphone/webcam built into the front of it, not obviously visible. Write audio/video nonstop, send out pics/audio to some private webserver.

- vnc running.

- some kind of gps thing would be quite nice!

Ideas? The more fool-proof the better   :Very Happy: 

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## avx

Well, all options fail, if the thief disasembles the pieces and sell them one by one or installs another OS - for that, something on the BIOS-level would be needed. GPS is a nice idea, but it's useless without any uplink to the internet or phone to contact the real owner.

If you've got a dog, mix up some perfumes or anything to get a custom scent, train it on that and then spil it onto the parts.

Some good windows and a strong door are a way better investment and if it's also about your data-safety, use encryption.

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## ToeiRei

I'd say you're starting your idea on the wrong side... imagine you're stealing your computer. What would you do?

Would you steal a whole box or would you just rip out some hardware as you want to have the data on it?

-> Locking down the case?

Would you 'just' plug it in to boot it up or would you boot it up with a livecd to see what's on it?

-> the wlan stuff would be pretty useless and discovered

-> the cam would be discovered

...

Just my 2 cents.

Rei

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## frostschutz

If you can get a cheap mobile phone / chip and sim card that does not produce monthly costs (for example a prepaid mobile), you could take the PCB out of the phone and hide it somewhere in your machine and find some way to actually power it as well (open the psu and put it in there). This way you could simply give your 'phone' a call and your mobile phone provider should be able to tell you the general area where it is located. I don't think a GPS solution will work too well... PCs are usually indoors, and you usually don't get a GPS signal indoors. Especially not from within a shielded computer case. It'll be hard enough to get a good signal for the mobile.

It's much easier to just not let it get stolen in the first place. If there are breakins in your area, buy yourself a door and a lock that can't be unlocked with a 5 minute tutorial like the ones you can find on YouTube.

Another solution would be to make the computer so that it does not matter where it is, i.e. encrypt your entire hard disk so the thief won't have your data even if it gets stolen. And you can just buy a new PC (surely the computer isn't the most valuable thing in your household and you'll have some kind of insurance?) and restore your backup.

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## Anarcho

That's exactly how I handle it. Buy yourself a safe mounted in the wall and put an encrypted backup usb HDD in it. From this data you can always recover your current situation. That all depends on the fact that your data is more important than your PC.

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## krinn

the case do it all.

People that steal things don't have time imo to check properly what they steal, so a top noch computer hidden in an apple2 case is certainly something a thief won't grab.

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## Saundersx

Lots of good ideas, I already do most of the important ones (through backups, unintentionally crappy case) and some I cannot do as I'm renting (change locks etc). The Apple II case lol, I threw out my Apple IIgs case about 3 years ago. In retrospect I should have kept it for a micro-atx pvr  :Crying or Very sad:  .

But I think people are missing the point, I want to catch the fawkers who would have stolen it. 

Also what is the best real-world non-crazy approach to encrypting my data that is recommended?

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## ToeiRei

I'm using LUKS as I got multiple users here booting the system.

But if I were you, I wouldn't encrypt the whole system - just the parts containing important data for performance sake.

Rei

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## yabbadabbadont

C-4 in the case with remote detonation capability...  and God help you if you ever type your pass phrase incorrectly.   :Twisted Evil: 

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## ToeiRei

 *yabbadabbadont wrote:*   

> C-4 in the case with remote detonation capability...  and God help you if you ever type your pass phrase incorrectly.  

 

I'd choose a range detector too - so if someone displaces the box, you'll surely notice...

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## frostschutz

I'm using LUKS too... for the whole drive. The main problem about not encrypting everything is, some apps leave traces elsewhere on your disk (swap, /tmp, ...), and encrypting every partition seperately is much more complicated than just having one encryption layer for the entire disk. Performance is only an issue if you overdo it - for some reason some people don't feel safe with a cipher that is considered safe today, so they use a much slower cipher. Or if your machine is old. I daresay that on any modern machine (dual core and above) encryption overhead is not much of an issue at all.

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## ToeiRei

My current 'layout' is an encrypted swap partition, temp-dirs are in ram (tmpfs) and an encrypted home partition - and I'd say it's pretty safe...

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## frostschutz

I'm sure it is too, it's just... there is so much information everywhere that I don't want other people to know. For example /var/log... there is so much stuff in there, if you read it you'll know how long I use my PC per day, names and access times of files on my local webserver, then there is the portage database of which apps are installed and since when, which will tell you what kind of games I play etc. If you have a closer look at it there is a lot a system can tell about its user even without having access to his /home directory. That's true for machines that are used and maintained by the same person anyhow. It's just something I don't want to have to worry about so I encrypted everything - and it does not hurt to do so performance wise on my system (it's a dual core 3ghz cpu that is bored most of the time anyway, and compared to Gentoo compiling stuff all the time the encryption overhead is not even worth mentioning).

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## ToeiRei

/var/log is a good point 

But don't forget some sensitive configurations in /etc like vpn and ipsec connections. I got around that with some symlinks to /etc, storing the data in my homedir.

Regarding the portage db directories I have to disagree, as software installed doesn't really tell what software you're actually using. (I'm keeping windows on a partition but haven't booted it since 2007)

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## frostschutz

 *ToeiRei wrote:*   

> But don't forget some sensitive configurations in /etc

 

I'm sure there is an endless list of things I have not thought of yet, but that's just my point... I don't have to care, as apart from the LUKS header, there is not a single unencrypted bit on my entire hard disk

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