The Arch Linux Tales: No Wi-Fi for Today!
Planted January 7, 2024
I have been using Arch Linux for days now for the sake of having full control over the hardware as well as the software (not moved to LibreBoot or CoreBoot but someday in the future). I have been utilising the suckless utilities and ricing my system for the best look I can have and take the privilege of saying “I use Arch BTW”. Since the total control of the Hardware and Software falls in the hands of the user and Arch repository Pacman releases even the latest packages, way before the software is even stable creating a sensation of being the early user of the tool at the same time being ready to crash out the system.
My Arch Installation Guide: https://github.com/PythonHacker24/Arch-Linux-Installation-Guide
For today, I was working on learning the Cosmwasm for Cosmos Network when I just opened a new terminal and did the most normal thing, update the system pacman -Syu and got the system out of network. No matter now what happens to the community or we go on to the phrase of “It works on my system (btw)”, it’s not gonna work on mine and I would need to figure that out. This is supposed to be something that I must be ready to handle and troubleshoot (which I absolutely didn’t while writing this).
Surely I made a backup of the system instead of all the cool wallpapers and of course some scripts that I didn’t backup on GitHub itself. So now I want to back-up those very important wallpapers into my USB. I don’t know why I didn’t get the thought of getting my USB into the CPU and getting those things out of my PC. Instead, I went on to insert the USB Installation media to get access to the drive pull out the files and send them over git to a GitHub repository. But the git wasn’t installed for some reason and I went on to get a USB and then mount the SSD and USB and do the successful backup. Now my wallpapers are on GitHub as well as all the suckless modifications that I made to make the most out of my Arch.
The files are now backed up when I thought of something here. I have been a security researcher and studying it for years now but this was something new to me. It’s a fact that physical attacks can be dangerous too in cases when they don’t get spotted. A laptop or PC if kept in an open space and the user goes out for some reason and the threat actors get access to the ports can have these consequences of data transfer EVEN IF THE SYSTEM IS LOCKED.
The only secure computer is one that’s unplugged, locked in a safe, and buried 20 feet under the ground. — Gene Spafford
Okay enough for this article, I would like to continue and explain the process of getting the data out of the system (even plant backdoors and extract keys) from a Linux system (with no bios protection off-course, can’t do it in the case and I don’t like to exaggerate the application of this technique). For my scenario, the fact that I was able to retrieve my MetaMask 12-character backup key was one of the things that made me think and write about this.