[OLPC Security] Grey Markets: differentiation of legitimately purchased laptops

[Mike C. Fletcher]

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> I envisioned buyers who know that the machine is not legitimate, but who
> want a reasonably legitimate appearance. For them, repainting doesn't
> have to be perfect, just good enough not to raise suspicions of other
> people passing by.
>   
At which point the "where is this likely" mitigation starts to come into 
play.  In the developed world, a painted laptop might not attract enough 
scrutiny that anyone would really look at it (but if it were discovered 
would have a pretty strong negative reaction (after all, you obviously 
*know* you are using a "covered up" laptop)), while in the developing 
world it would be sufficiently rare to see a donor laptop that people 
might scrutinize it more closely.
> Ideally, making illegitimate laptops look legitimate should cost the bad
> guys enough money to kill any possible profit. Unfortunately, that is
> not possible for the XO without removing all repair options and/or
> raising the manufacturing cost significantly.
>   
Without some serious reworking that we can't achieve this late in the 
process, we can't make it impossible, what we want is an inexpensive, 
non-disruptive way to make it obvious which laptops are which, so that 
misappropriation becomes more involved and more likely to be uncovered.  
Hopefully we can make a small change that makes the effort significantly 
greater for the bad actors.

Take care,
Mike

-- 
________________________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://www.vrplumber.com
  http://blog.vrplumber.com