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Re: [tor-talk] Best devices to boot Tails off of?
On 2015-08-14 22:20, Qaz wrote:
Are there flash drives that really work well with Tails? Or does it not
really matter?
In theory, it shouldn't matter. In practice, well, things are possibly
more complicated if an attack were targeted at Tails in particular.
I installed Tails on a Sandisk Cruzer and it seems it
wouldn't boot or at least show the login screen, just gets stuck with
the blue and white progress bar. I think I have seen a list of which
devices will probably work well with Tails but I'm not sure.
At least in theory, most any flash drive should work. But it's dependent
on the drive, BIOS/UEFI and it's configuration, whether it passes off
control of the USB drive properly, etc. But most modern hardware should
handle this just fine; I haven't personally run into a non-bootable USB
disk or motherboard in quite some time.
But that's not to say you won't, or that your hardware is configured
appropriately for your media.
Are DVD-R's
the safest way to boot Tails off of?
Safest, probably. At least in theory, once you finalize optical media,
it should be truly read-only, and the worst that could happen is that
bits could be written (which would corrupt the disk-level checksums,
destroying the disk)
I wouldn't totally trust flash media to be read-only, even if it has a
physical switch as these could easily be poorly implemented and allow a
compromised OS to persist between reboots.
How do can I further protect my
Tails installation on a flash drive? Would doing a checksum from another
OS on my Tails device help ensure it's safeness/integrity?
Yes, you shouldn't trust any checksum or other verification from the
compromised device itself.
(All "in my opinion", as a lay-person, I have no specific knowledge of
Tails specific issues)
--
Dave Warren
http://www.hireahit.com/
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davejwarren
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