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This Laptop Will Self-Destruct
call -151 writes: "Interesting article at wired about how
since 1997, 205 laptops have disappeared from the
British Defense Ministry most with classified info. Oops, left
my laptop on the bus...
So now the plan is to have ``a built-in electronic self-destruct
mechanism that erases a laptop's hard drive if the case is opened by force'' when the code is forgotten, as well as ''a tracking feature that allows a computer gone astray to call home." Maybe we'll see
some of this tech trickle down to other interesting uses ..." Maybe vigilante justice in the future will consist of LoJacked laptops allowed to be stolen, with the Semtex inside blown up via 802.11. Hey -- business method patent ...
now the plan is to have ``a built-in electronic self-destruct mechanism that erases a laptop's hard drive
Windows?
In retrospect I should have patented the idea. I could probably get some decent royalties from assorted intelligence agencies around the world.
If you're from one of aforementioned intelligence agencies, there are lots more ideas where that came from hint hint...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Imagine a boss who wants to avoid confrontation presses a button, nothing says fired like blown off hands and a charred face...
Rehab is for quitters...
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
They may want to consider attaching 15,000 handcuffs at 2 pounds apiece.
One of the main reasons for this is the historical tradition in Britain to rule over peoples and waves, since the days of William the Conqueror. The British have always had a caste system based on gearing the country to wage war, and to rule other countries. The British upper classes are bred to lead over others, even genetically speaking this can be seen - every president of America has been of stout Anglo Saxon extraction.
The result of all this is that the British can exert huge influence abroad, and even today the pax Britannica continues, through our proxies, the Americans, who inherited their ideals from us.
The shining light of Celtic inventiveness and Anglo Saxon ruling and liberty has meant that every corner of the globe has had the values of liberty and democracy enforced upon it. America would not exist were it not for the Mother country.
The secret services are trusted by the British people, as they are composed of boarding school, cricket playing chaps who have been steeped in playing 'the game' since childhood. This tradition is why Britain was aware of the Soviet threat before america, and managed to convince america to join us against the Soviets. Same with Hitler - the Americans were to scared, and thought he was no threat. But Britain nobly stood alone.
In this laptop, we see the traditions of Old England and Empire distilled to a pure essence : Trust noone, treat all fairly and always some first - tho' 'tis no shame to come second, something that our American children have perhaps forgotten.
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We have cameras covering every square inch of Britain so that every individual can be tracked.
But we can't tell you where Agent 69 was last Tuesday when he lost his laptop.
And it's a good thing we've got these cameras to keep track of the IRA, or they'd set up us the bomb.
So we'll give each agent a small thermite bomb in a briefcase instead, and give 'em free roam of the city.
The fuck-up fairy must be workin' overtime.
Is it because its more trendy than a desktop or something? Even if this is the case, who cares? Why does the intellegence community need them? If data is sensitive, even in the slightest, it shouldn't EVER be in a position that it could be accidently LEFT LYING AROUND SOMEWHERE! It should remain confined within a secure guarded perimeter. Even when kept internally it is subject to potential security breaches, networks can be cracked, spies can smuggle out information, etc, but at least thats a far cry than being able to just pick up a 4 pound object and walk away with it and spend all the time you need trying to figure out what you have.
Besides this reason, laptops are fragile, expensive, and rarely contain many user servicable parts. Even if you were going to set up a system in a public environment, would you prefer your potential thief to be forced to lug around 40+ pounds of bulky equipment or be able to slide 4 pounds worth of equipment into a backpack and walk away?
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
It seems it would be a lot cheaper, and probably more secure, to just encrypt the hard disk. That way, if someone can get to the disk, it still doesn't do you any good.
Basically what the manufacturer is working on (it's not available yet) is a motion sensor and alarm, tied in with some form of drive encryption. Move it far enough that it thinks it's being stolen (user-configurable parameters) and it bluescreens the system and won't restart without a 16-digit code; the drive contents are protected because they're encrypted using keys built into the motion sensor system.
This is far from optimal:
Still, at the moment there aren't a lot of other options out there either. I'd expect to see quite a few more products along similar lines cropping up in the next few years.
There are certainly more effective possibilities out there....
One possibility would be a combination of hardware-level drive encryption keys and this sort of motion-sensor setup to keep the system from being stolen while active. Keys would be read from a removable device (iButton- or USBKey-like) as part of the power-up process and would be kept in RAM. Removing the key device would trigger a hardware-level system lock (many notebooks have these already, completely independent of the OS) but the system could keep running. Because the system stays on, it remains easy to step away from it while leaving it well protected - requiring the key to be present for drive access would be much more troublesome, because it would mean either shutting down or hibernating the system or having the OS aware of the protection so disk activity could be prevented without the key. This could be done almost entirely independent of the OS, with a fairly simple interface to make configuration changes.
-- fencepost
fencepost
just a little off
The client uploads and downloads blocks of possible keys to and from a central keyserver - and the "reported" blocks have your email address attached to them. So when the PC's/Laptops were stolen, they contacted Distributed.net, who went through the keyserver logs and found the IP address of the stolen computer. This information was turned over to authorities and the stolen computers were traced to the thieves and returned to their rightful owner(s). I am unaware of whether the distributed.net client(s) were CLI or GUI, or if they were running in "hidden mode". If in hidden mode they'd be invisible to the thief.
It's an interesting (and free) solution to finding stolen laptops... well... as long as the thief goes out onto the internet before wiping the hard drive.. but how many thieves are that saavy?
[Connection closed by foreign host]
There's been a lot of discussion of various ways to encrypt drives for protection, and also of ways to cause drives to self-destruct. The problem with the encryption systems is maintaining the secrecy of the key, when the attacker has access to all the hardware and software. The problem with the self-destruct systems is keeping things sufficiently controlled to destroy the data but not hurt anyone.
The following synthesis makes sense to me: Have the drive encrypted with a symetric-key cipher. Have the key stored in NVRAM or some equivalent. In normal operation, the encryption and decryption is handled transparently. either by software drivers, or (better yet) by the drive controller itself. Because no person needs to know the key, it can be truly random and long enough. To activate the self-destruct, simply erase the key. I don't know much about NVRAM, but I imagine that it is possible to "wipe" it sufficiently that the data can't be recovered. If not, this idea would have to be modified.
In the best-case scenario, all of this functionality is integrated into the drive controller, so that data is encrypted before it's sent to the disk, and decrypted before it's returned to the system bus. This makes life easier for everyone since the encrypted drive system looks just like a normal IDE (or SCSI) system from the outside. More importantly, it means that the key can be stored inside the controller card, and never needs to be made available to any other hardware or software. This minimizes the risk of key compromize, even by a malicious user.
The card would have to support an instruction (or physical connection) whereby it could be signalled to self-destruct. This could be activated by LoJack-style equipment, or what have you.
Once the key's truly erased, the contents of the drive become totally unusable.
As usual, Big Blue has an answer.
Their TravelStar (and DeskStar, too) hard drives support the use of a password. The system's BIOS has to support it, but if it does (like the Dell Latitude's, I think), the hard drive will not permit any read or write commands to data areas. There's a master password which can be set to override the user password, but if you control both, and forget both, the only way to get the hard drive back is to send it a special command which will cause it to erase the entire user-accessible data area, then unlock itself.
Don't bother trying to change the logic board, either -- the passwords and settings are stored on a non-externally-addressable area on the platter.
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