Shot of the "Securebook 5" refusing to boot with a new hard drive.

Shot of the "Securebook 5" refusing to boot with a new hard drive.
Shot of the "Securebook 5" refusing to boot with a new hard drive.
(Image credit: @zephray_wenting on Twitter)

Over on Twitter, user @zephray_wenting recently [1]documented his
buying of a locked-down prison laptop on eBay, and subsequent attempts
to jailbreak it into an actually-usable freedom-loving machine.

The [2]laptop in question, the Justice Tech Solutions Securebook 5, is
outfitted with an 8th Gen Intel Celeron N3450, a chipset running at a
maximum of 2.2 GHz across four cores. There is also 4GB of
non-upgradable LPDDR3 [3]RAM, and... no storage to hold an operating
system, since the laptop was apparently only intended for docked use.
It's not quite a powerhouse, but it does have reasonably modern specs
for light desktop use— if you could actually run an operating system on
it.

By default, the unit has no operating system, no USB ports, and an
unhelpful [4]BIOS that auto-resets itself whenever the power is cut,
making it extra difficult to flash a new BIOS over. You will also be
presented with a locked password screen on boot. The laptop itself does
look kind of nice, though— if you're a fan of transparent plastic
shells for your electronics.

Overhead shot of the Securebook 5, revealing it uses an (apparently)
standard AMI BIOS.
Overhead shot of the Securebook 5, revealing it uses an (apparently)
standard AMI BIOS. (Image credit: @zephray_wenting on Twitter)

But rest assured: the story does not end there. As always, a techie
doubling as a sufficiently determined madman is all you need to address
an issue like this. As the original thread continues, @zephray_wenting
proves those madman credentials by working around all the limitations
he finds. By using a flash programmer, he was able to locate the
password in the BIOS' NVRAM and zero it out... but came across the
prior-mentioned self-restoring issue in the process.

The real workaround, then? Replacing the BIOS without removing power to
the motherboard, since doing so would automatically reflash the
original BIOS. This allowed him to enter the original BIOS, but the
matter of installing an OS was still problematic. The laptop is also
unusual in having a hard drive whitelist, which means only very
specific drives could be used even if inserted (and none were
included)— so instead, he had to manually mod a USB hub onto the laptop
to connect boot media.

Fortunately, there was no USB whitelist of any kind— so the subsequent
installation of [5]Ubuntu MATE went off without a hitch! The modder
also went on to install the appropriately titled "[6]FreeDoom" onto the
laptop, which is basically an open-source effort at recreating the Doom
engine while maintaining compatibility with existing Doom mods.

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References

1. https://twitter.com/zephray_wenting/status/1761548861896606014
2. https://www.tomshardware.com/tag/laptops
3. https://www.tomshardware.com/tag/memory
4. https://www.tomshardware.com/tag/bios
5. https://ubuntu-mate.org/
6. https://freedoom.github.io/