Configuring the Touch Bar for System Lockdown


Jonathan Zdziarski on confirming the new MacBook Pro Touch Bar for a security feature:

The new Touch Bar is often marketed as a gimmick, but one powerful capability it has is to function as a lockdown mechanism for your machine in the event of a physical breach. By changing a few power management settings and customizing the Touch Bar, you can add a button that will instantly lock the machine's screen and then begin a countdown (that's configurable, e.g. 5 minutes) to lock down the entire system, which will disable the fingerprint reader, remove power to the RAM, and discard your FileVault keys, effectively locking the encryption, protecting you from cold boot attacks, and prevent the system from being unlocked by a fingerprint.

This basically puts the computer into hibernation mode rather than sleep. Hibernation mode is a deep sleep function primarily designed to conserve battery life for extended inactivity, but also has some security benefits as described above. You can configure a Mac laptop to quickly go into hibernation mode rather than sleep due to closing a display or inactivity, but this is a nifty alternative use of the Touch Bar. Plus this idea gives some added security for use of the fingerprint sensor.