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Death On Demand Drive Tech
Xanderoth writes "Engadget has an article on 'Dead on Demand' technology to destroy your disk drive should it be compromised by any number of ways. From the article: 'Configurable triggers such as removal or tampering of the drive, removal of device from a resting GPS point, cellular telephone call, or even a change in temperature will release a chemical mist into the drive (not the computer) destroying it layer by layer.' Of course the drives, due out next year, are expected to be priced between $2,500 to $9,000 each, plus a yearly fee."
All I see there, on not4chan.org, are drawings. In some areas they are illegal I'm sure (along with 'regular' pornography too). However - at least in the United States - drawings are deemed legal since no person was harmed in the process.
:).
Pretty good principle, if an action or behaviour by a person harms no one (or only the person themself) then it should be allowed. I'd call it the harm principle I'd call it the harm principle or maybe negative liberty
I think the author entangled his drive ideas.
from TFA -
"The drives will be available "early next year" for between $2,500 to $9,000 each."
the yearly fee is only the for the other solutions that are already available like -
"Other solutions exist to delete data or lock the computer if a user enters too many failed passwords or does not login at all over a specified length of time -- Beachhead Solutions will sell you their offering for $129 a year per computer."
To summarize, the new drives aren't on a yearly fee, only the other offerings mentioned that are already on the market.
1) would just require a bit of experimentation on old dead drives. I believe you can get away with using fairly little thermite (although some overkill doesn't hurt) - you don't have to melt the entire hard drive, casing and all, you just have to scorch the platters beyond recovery.
2) should also be quite doable - since we're not talking excessive amounts of thermite here, I think a 5 1/4"-sized ceramic mount/casing for a regular 3 1/2" drive would work. It just has to be isolated enough to make sure the rest of the computer doesn't burst into flames and burn the house down.
'course, using an external drive would make it even easier...
Anyone up for a summer electronics/pyrotechnics project?
I suggest making your own with a layer of thermite on top of the drive. I wouldn't trust a chemical mist to destroy data to the point where it couldn't be read with a SQUID device, I want to see my hard drive melt! Plus if they charge $9000, you'd be hardpressed to build a computer expensive enough where it would cost more than if the whole thing was toasted.
what sig?
But since the child pornography problem is routinely overstated, this wouldn't be a problem.
Yes, its overstated, because child pornography is the most common excuse used for violating our civil rights.
"We can't allow [insert something the cops fear here] because it will only aid child pornographers. Thank heavens for 9/11 and terrorists; it allows the cops and politicians to work another cliche for a decade or two.
The way to do this is so simple, using plain old off-the-shelf drive components. Here's how you do it. Every drive sold today has a built-in buffer, so they all have built-in storage and processing which stores every block in RAM before writing it out to disk, and looks for the block in RAM before fetching it from disk. So there's a reasonable amount of smart electronics in there right now, and it's all totally transparent to the IDE interface. In other words, the host computer doesn't need to know anything about what the electronics are doing as they read and write blocks from the physical media.
So the way to do this is to have an encryption operation put in the loop. The encryption key is stored in a small bit of ROM somewhere. There are two electrodes across this ROM, hooked up to a nice sized capacitor.
When some triggering event (any kind of event which could be detected by some kind of electronics, which include all the same things this device works on) decides "it's time to make this disk unrecoverable" then that capacitor is discharged, turning the ROM (with the encryption key) into a little piece of melted glass.
Problem solved! All using existing off-the-shelf stuff. It's something that could be easily retrofitted into existing drive designs for not much money. Some geek could probably put it together in a couple of weeks and start selling them. And because this is now being published here on Slashdot it can't be patented.
It still boggles my mind. What are they doing messing around with chemicals to attempt to destroy a surface, when they could just do it all in electronics.
They still need the same kind of tamper resistance, but this whole thing allows the disk's contents to be destroyed forever in microseconds, no chemical reactions needed, based on any electronic trigger.
Oh yeah, there would also need to be a lithium battery to keep the destructo-capacitor charged, and there would need to be a circuit that discharges the capacitor if the case is tampered with, and all that other stuff. QED.
It seems that FreeBSD's geom disk (or partition) encryption allows you to destroy all the master keys should the need arise. It's not the same as having the HD die on you, but if the disks take the end of the earth to actually decrypt, it's as good as dead.
Ferric chloride is acidic.
Obviously you have no clue. The U-2 may have been a spy plane, but anyone can tell you that the EP-3 is just a maritime patrol aircraft [defenselink.mil]. Besides, it's over 40 years old. If it was a secret spy plane, I don't think you'd be able to google so much information on the subject.
Don't you just love it when an AC without a clue says someonelse needs one?
The EP-3 is the elextronic surveillence version of the P-3 (the US's land based MPA). It is used to intercept ellectonic transmissions (amongst other things) for analysis by the US. While it is overt (it's hard to hide an EP-3 flying over international waters), so is the U-2 (although the U-2 flies high so it's a lot harder to intercept). If you limit spying to covert operations, then it may not be spying but it still was (probably) on on intel mission (or else we would have sent a regular P-3) and not the much rarer EP-3.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I have done this myself with several drives, and it has a 80% success rate. No weird sounds==error on PCB. For all those other kind of drives, throw them in the freezer for 10 minutes. This can get them going long enough to copy all the important stuff from them. When it heats up it will fail again, so be quick about it... The fun part is, you can charge customers A LOT of money for doing this to their dead drive.
Error #13: No coffee. Operator halted. Please place boot device at bottom.