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Comment on Show HN: PanicLock – Close your MacBook lid disable TouchID –> password unlock

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If this were a concern for me the better choice is shutting down the laptop to encrypt the drive and disable biometrics. This does nothing since the drive is still unencrypted.

This does nothing since the drive is still unencrypted.

Even though the data is unencrypted in memory, an attacker would still need either a local privilege escalation (from the login window?), or some sort of side-channel attack if they're still not able to get the password.

What do you mean by “the drive is still unencrypted”?

If your threat scenario includes somebody performing a DRAM freezing attack or similar, these are orders of magnitude harder to pull off successfully than to compel or bypass a biometric sensor, especially when the device is covered in the owners fingerprints.

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