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Self-Destructing USB Stick
Hugh Pickens writes "PC World reports that Victorinox, maker of the legendary Swiss Army Knife, has launched a new super-secure memory stick that sounds like something out of Mission: Impossible. The Secure Pro USB comes in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB sizes, and provides a variety of security measures including fingerprint identification, a thermal sensor, and even a self-destruct mechanism. Victorinox says the Secure is 'the most secure [device] of its kind available to the public.' The Secure features a fingerprint scanner and a thermal sensor 'so that the finger alone, detached from the body, will still not give access to the memory stick's contents.' While offering no explanation how the self-destruct mechanism works, Victorinox says that if someone tries to forcibly open the memory stick it triggers a self-destruct mechanism that 'irrevocably burns [the Secure's] CPU and memory chip.' At a contest held in London, Victorinox put its money where its mouth was and put the Secure Pro to the test offering a £100,000 cash prize ($149,000) to a team of professional hackers if they could break into the USB drive within two hours. They failed."
And people have never lied about that before.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Just for curiosity's sake, I'm trying to think of how difficult that would actually be....
Exposing blood to air gives your pretty decent oxygen saturation. Doing that for any great length of time is likely to cause clotting or other nastiness, so it isn't exactly an alternative to the "lung" side of "heart lung machine"; but this isn't medicine we are talking about, just fooling a sensor. In the same vein, the sensor isn't going to care about blood type, immune matching, or anything like that. Also, a finger doesn't have that much volume to in. A few CCs of fresh blood(from say, yourself, or the same guy you took the finger from), exposed to air for a few seconds, would be fine.
Pulse could presumably be simulated with a low power pump(perhaps a small peristaltic unit), with its power supply being turned on and off at roughly the right frequency. I can't imagine that huge exactness is required, since the pulse rates of humans vary fairly widely with conditions, and people would be pissed if their fingerprint scanner doesn't work if they've just run up a flight of stairs, or are freaking out about the big presentation in 20 minutes.
The real difficulty, or lack thereof, would really come down to the artery/vein structure of the finger. If you can get away with just connecting to a couple of big blood vessels and ignoring some minor leakage(since this is all temporary and nonmedical), an amateur willing to just shove a few little tubes in there should do fine. If the sensor can detect(and is tuned to care about) the details of the vascalature, you'd pretty much need a cooperative microsurgeon, a fancy microscope, and real surgical kit. That would probably be problematic for most applications.
Obviously, the above would be a huge pain in the ass, even under good conditions, and is highly unlikely to be worth it(probably easier just to show the owner of the finger your pair of bolt cutters, and let him operate the scanner for you, unless you are in an environment where the cameras would pick up on that, in which case the above described apparatus could, quite plausibly, be fit down the sleeve of a not-too-suspicious garment).
Perhaps more practical, I wonder how difficult it would be to produce a variant of the classic "gelatin finger with correct fingerprint" that reads as having oxygen sat and a pulse? Would one made of blood agar return plausible results under optical oxygen saturation tests? If so, that's raise the bar from "supermarket" to "laboratory supply house"; but that wouldn't be too bad. For pulse, the question is "how complex does your simulated vasculature have to be?" Any decently competent modeler can probably mould a simple circulatory loop into a gel finger; but achieving an actual capillary structure is sci-fi self-assembling nanomaterials stuff...
I saw a self-destructed sample of this unit at CES in January. It did not self destruct from an opening attempt, as opening those is quite easy. The drive is enclosed by a simple clear plastic shell (not epoxy filled). The 'destruction' was caused by presumably supplying voltage in excess of the USB spec. You could literally pry the plastic off of the USB drive with the included knife, and it would work just fine (sans enclosure).
Also, it would be nice if PCWorld at would at least get the name of these things correct:
http://www.swissarmy.com/multitools/Pages/Category.aspx?category=presentation+pro&
Perhaps the USB-only part is dubbed 'Secure', but you won't ask for that name when you want to buy one.
Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective
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Mod parent up. Apple's File Vault, for example, stores the key in a silly way, which reduces the effective key length of their 128-bit AES implementation to something closer to 112 bits. Given that the recent attacks on AES reduce the complexity further, so File Vault with AES-128 is creeping closer to being feasible to crack. Hardware AES is potentially vulnerable to side-channel attacks.
If the drive is secure, you don't give attackers 2 hours to break it, you publish the implementation details and give a prize to the first person to demonstrate a feasible attack with this knowledge.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yup.
Plus, if somebody did need to crack one of these within two hours of getting their hands on it with minimal equipment this isn't how they'd go about it.
Step one for an attacker would be to go to a store and just buy a dozen of these USB drives. Then they attack the drives from home with a full machine shop, a clean room, electron microscopes, logic analyzers, FPGAs, and the works.
Then they figure out how to defeat the devices defenses, and then package that up into a minimal set of tools and steps needed to accomplish the feat in a few minutes.
Then when they steal the device they already know exactly what they're doing and it takes them no time at all.
It would be like a bank robber deciding on a whim to break into a bank, without checking plans, casing the place, identifying the vault make/model, etc. Like anything, a quickly executed mission depends on good planning.