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by TeMPOraL 3321 days ago
Here's a business/service idea off the top of my head.

As a traveller, just before going through security you wipe your device and "sell" it to a vendor in exchange for a voucher that will allow you to exchange it back when you land and go through the security at your destination. You take the new device, provision it with your cloud data, and go on your visit; when you go back, you go through this process again, in the other direction.

Lots of problems to be solved with that idea, not the least of which is the business model, but it would allow you to travel without any electronics on your person.

1 comments

I toyed with building an application like this, except that you just carry your device with you. The application basically tarballs your entire environment up, offsites it, and then wipes and factory-resets your device (incidentally I got lost in the rabbit hole of trying to wipe an SSD heh). It's completely clean, you can surrender your device for inspection, give passwords, etc. And then after you're through, you download the application which acts like a dropper, and it explodes your environment and data onto the device again. Docker was really useful here.
But this makes it very obvious you've reset your phone. Which is a red flag - although not technically illegal, so far.

You really want something that looks like an in-use device and gives no hint that you have sensitive files stored anywhere else.

It would have been configurable. The important thing is that your blob of data (e.g. VeraCrypt volume) is offsited and wiped. You could leave your laptop otherwise completely lived-in, just not containing your data anymore. Otherwise, I've worked for companies that gave out loaner phones for overseas travel. A factory-reset phone is much less suspicious than a threadbare "factory-reset" laptop.