Hardening the Panasonic CF line

Post all general Toughbook related things here.
Post Reply
Message
Author
Grub
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Jun 30, 2014 9:52 am

Hardening the Panasonic CF line

#1 Post by Grub »

Dear all,

This is my first post on the forum, so I would like first to congratulate you for this wonderful work.
Buildng a community is difficult and we appreciate your work. :cheers:

We are a company located in France and we would like to study the roughness of the Panasonic CF line. For testing purpose, we puchased a Panasonic CF-19 mk3. Our company is equiped with some PCB robots, ovens and CNCs and we can do some customisation work around the Panasonic line.

According to Wikipedia, "TEMPEST is a National Security Agency codename referring to spying on information systems through leaking emanations, including unintentional radio or electrical signals, sounds, and vibrations. TEMPEST covers both methods to spy upon others and also how to shield equipment against such spying". Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST

I would like to make clear, that we do not intend to reach fully tempest rugged standards. Especially, we are not interested in any military standard (i.e. survive an Electromagnetic Pulse). It would make not sense for a company to have a rugged computer when all electrical infrastructure is destroyed. Also, production of military equipment is restricted in France as well as in other countries, we do not expect to do testing in these fields. Therefore, to avoid any misusage, we will not release any modified hardware to individuals and will not export out of the European-Union, unless we know what restrictions may or may not apply.

We are interested in hardening the Panasonic CF line, in order to avoid spying, especially in companies.

On my to-do-list:
* Studying the electrical filtering of the A/C adapter. In some cases, the A/C adapter can be used to carry information and transformed into some kind of "network adapter". This should be avoided by electrical firtering. Some A/C adapters include proper filters and there is no need for additional filtering.
* Studying electrical interference. I was first attracted by the CF-19 design as it looks like a natural faraday cage. Also, I noticed that there are some US army versions of the CF-19, which implies that at some point, the CF-19 ***could*** be used as a Faraday cage.
* Removing unecessary parts, such as removing WIFI, sound boards and moulding the other boards so that any intrusion at hardware level is made difficult. We could apply foam/lake using robots and bake the boards afterwards.
* Studying the board design to analyse hardware/software intrusions. I am thinking of the BIOS, testing utilities and also the watchdog. In the manual, I read that the CF-19 was using electricity, even in fully stopped mode, which implies that at some point the CF-19 can be waked-up. I would like to avoid this and make sure that when the CF-19 is stopped, it cannot be waked-up by anyone or by a signal.
* Studying the inclusion of a screen privacy shield into the original screen.
* Releasing a custom Linux kernel for the CF line, including memory protection patches, aka "grSec".

In other words, we are looking for a computer which would be targeted at network admins, not driving around the world with WIFI and GPS.

First question, did some of you studied or modified the Panasonic CF line for more roughness? If you see any more item on our to-do-list, please let me know.

Second question, are Panasonic documents available as regards electromagnetic compliance? It could be that the CF line is close to a Faraday cage, but security has been reduced on purpose. It seems that the holes in metal cages (such as hard drive and motherboard) are voluntarily too large and should be smaller. I noticed two grounding plugs located left and right of the Expansion Bus Connector (Port Replicator / Car Mounter), but I could find no information around grounding in the administration and service manuals. These two plugs seem to be good candidates for grounding, and grounding IS required for serious usage.

Kind regards,
Grub

User avatar
kode-niner
Posts: 700
Joined: Sat Jun 07, 2014 7:39 am
Location: Canada

Re: Hardening the Panasonic CF line

#2 Post by kode-niner »

Reading from the sidelines here. I, too, would be interested in knowing more on this topic.
Daily drives a CF-31

Post Reply

Return to “General Toughbook Talk”