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."

Comments

What if they cut the finger and heat it

[unity100]

to 37 degrees celsius ?

Re:What if they cut the finger and heat it

[boef]

maybe next time they will have a team of professional cannibals have a go...

Re:What if they cut the finger and heat it

[jamesh]

Or alternatively, find someone the owner of the USB stick cares about and threaten to cut off that persons finger if the owner doesn't cooperate.

Re:What if they cut the finger and heat it

[Shadow of Eternity]

Mod parent up.

In fantasy land people think that the reaction to biometric security and encryption is somebody giving up or resorting to hollywood methods of getting around it.

In reality the reaction is to just start killing or maiming people until you cooperate.

Re:What if they cut the finger and heat it

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/538/

Re:What if they cut the finger and heat it

[John Hasler]

Some guy who finds your USB stick on the train isn't going to hunt you down and beat the password out of you. If he had motive and opportunity to do that he would already have done it.

Re:What if they cut the finger and heat it

[Red Flayer]

I don't think sticking the severed finger in a microwave or oven constitutes "Hollywood methods". It's pretty intuitive and a lot faster/more convenient than a loud/long process of torturing someone.

Better yet, why bother with the microwave? That would be an unneeded hassle (and somewhat suspicious, if in a public area). Instead, stash the finger in one of your body's seemingly-designed-for-this warm orifices, the surreptitiously remove it when it's time to use it.

Two hours?

[mog007]

Presumably, if you had physical access to the drive, wouldn't you have more time to crack it than two hours?

Re:Two hours?

[stupid_is]

But then you wouldn't be able to have a snazzy Press Release stating that professional hackers couldn't get into it.

Re:Two hours?

[warGod3]

The article didn't mention two things:

* Was the "team of professional hackers" paid for NOT cracking this?
* Was the "team of professional hackers" able to beat the security at all?

Re:Two hours?

[quantumplacet]

from TFA:

Victorinox says the device uses the Advanced Encryption Standard 256 to protect your data as well as its own proprietary security chip.

Re:Two hours?

[compro01]

And people have never lied about that before.

Re:Two hours?

[somersault]

Except that anyone using a secure USB stick as the only copy of important data deserves to loose it if they loose the password.

Dear gods man, twice in the same sentence? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!! Run, before the most foul ranks from the deepest depths of nether spelling nazi hell are unleashed and rain their fiery vengeance upon you!

Re:Two hours?

[jridley]

Yeah, but that could mean anything. Does it specifically say that your data is encrypted to AES 256, or just that AES 256 is "used to protect your data"? The latter could mean that the key is encrypted with AES 256, but then the key is just an XOR key for the data. Or that AES 256 is only used in the driver software it loads (if there is any, I don't know).

There have been cases before of "secure" thumb drives that just had bits on the controller that had to be unlocked with keys to allow access to the data, and simply shorting/lifting those pins on the controller defeated the security.

A 2 hour test is pointless. The real test would be to give the devices to some guys who had the ability to put logic analyzers and scopes on the pins, and reverse engineer the entire system over the course of weeks. THEN see if they could generate a relatively simple way to break into the data.

Re:Two hours?

[Jurily]

That and it's a genuine concern in business- apparently when they ask "what if I forget my password" the answer "then you try to remember it or your data is gone" isn't acceptable.

Isn't that the whole point, that people without the password won't get the data? I know business can be retarded, but come on.

I believe the proper procedure would be to ask the boss to open the vault and get the only written copy of said password out, followed by paperwork.

Re:Two hours?

[spacerog]

"At a contest held in London, Victorinox was 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."

Umm, they weren't Pros. The contest was open to anyone who preregistered and you got to keep the knife after the contest. Not only that there were several restrictions on the contest. First you have to live in the UK, preregister and you only get two hours. Because ya know the bad guys always tell you who they are and always give up after two hours. Oh, and you have to be present to win, no Internet based attacks, you can only use Windows 64bit or whatever Linux flavor they are providing and of course you have to give up your exploit if you win. All that and more for a measly hundred thousand pounds? Yeah, no thanks, but hey it makes for great publicity and it is a cool knife.

So called "Hacker Challenges" are not a valid security assessment.

- Space Rogue

Re:Two hours?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Even if they aren't lying, the question is "did they use AES 256 correctly?"

There are a number of ways, some of them non-obvious, to produce a system that does, in fact, use AES 256 in some capacity; but doesn't actually achieve reasonably security against anybody who wouldn't also be stopped by XOR and a scary looking autorun program(particularly since, as this is a small USB drive, the attacker can probably make some plausible assumptions about some of the plaintext, based on what is known about what fat32 volumes look like).

Re:Two hours?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Two hours?

[sorak]

Presumably, if you had physical access to the drive, wouldn't you have more time to crack it than two hours?

Exactly. You have 24 before Keifer Southerland kicks your ass.

Re:Two hours?

[Andy Dodd]

See, for example, the Kingston DataTraveler BlackBox scenario. It and two drives (one from Verbatim, one from... I forget who...) that used the same crypto chip had FIPS 140-2 validated AES implementations, but they completely screwed up key management. All of the drives apparently used the same AES key...

Re:Two hours?

[Rich0]

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.

Re:Two hours?

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, it was reduced-key variations of AES-256 (such as using a 196-bit key with the AES-256 algorithm) that they were able to further reduce (to the effectiveness of a 112 bit key); as far as I know, no one yet has a feasible attack against plain-vanilla AES 128 or 256. Doesn't mean it won't happen eventually, but the crypto algorithm is almost never the problem. The problem with security for data-at-rest is always how the key is stored; and on a stand-alone device like a USB stick, it's quite possible that the key is stored on the device using a weaker form of encryption - most likely one that simply involves a simple pass phrase.

Professional hackers? 2 hours?

[alexandre]

I thought that we had stopped 10 years ago to consider such scam contest as serious security proof?

Re:Professional hackers? 2 hours?

[bluefoxlucid]

Seeing as I used to pen test; and we regularly raped the shit out of banks and utilities and gave them volumes to explain their complete and utter security failure AND methods to correct their gross incompetence; AND they had competent security teams that thanked us both for pounding issues they had found into their managers head AS WELL AS finding issues they had no prior knowledge of; AND we regularly got called back after a year for another pen test and found less, some of the same (not fixed), and some new issues; I have got to say that penetration testing is the only real way to test a system's real-world security.

Seriously, you have the people sitting around coming up with all kinds of policies trying to secure a system. These are just theory. IIS is configured correctly, MySQL is configured correctly, we did a lot of ridiculous useless shit to lock down Windows and Linux (like deleting the swap file at shutdown, woo!). Everything's compliant, so it must be secure.

Then you have people like me, sitting down, squinting, poking, prod--*FOOM!* .... oh shit o_o it asplode....

Re:Professional hackers? 2 hours?

[HungryHobo]

Oh I didn't say it was useless.
My point is that pen testing doesn't secure your system.
It only provides feedback as to how secure your system really is within a reasonable margin of error.

If you test a system and find a hundred holes and hand over a neat list and they diligently go away and fix all the holes you found then their system is only marginally more secure than it was before.
The systematic failures that lead to the problems being there in the first place are still there making more problems.
The same crappy code is still there with a few patches.

On the other hand if you do a full pen test and find no security holes or only a few minor ones then that's a decent indication that there are very few there at all.

Pen testing is a fine way to test and be able to say "this system probably has very few problems" or "this system is utterly riddled with faults" but pen testing is an awful way to actually secure your system.

At best pen testing can show blinkered managers that they need to pay some attention to security and in that one case may help to actually improve security.

Thermal sensor?

[zmotula]

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.'

Surely if somebody can chop off your finger he can also warm it up?

Re:Thermal sensor?

[Asic Eng]

Yeah, but there'll be fingerprints of the owner all over the device.

Shame it has a knife on it

[solevita]

From TFA:

Anyone stateside wanting one of these bad boys will have to wait patiently or hop on a transatlantic flight.

Just remember to take it out of your pocket before getting back on that plane.

I'd be interested in one without the knife as something to play with, but I'm not sure I want to carry all the rest of it around with me (I'm not some knife freak, but I want a USB stick to be just a USB stick).

Re:Shame it has a knife on it

[boef]

Indeed.
Not only do you have to let it out of your sight/control if you fly, it also comes with a built in way for someone to threaten you or cut off your finger (and use it quickly.. they are not nice to touch once they go cold)

Re:Shame it has a knife on it

[jweller]

I doubt very seriously that it's incendiary. I would guess that it is electrical in nature. I built an anti tamper device before and used a 300v photo flash cap run down the ground rail. VERY effective. Actually blew some SMB components off of the board and set several tantalum capacitors on fire.

Although I guess that could be considered incendiary....

Re:Shame it has a knife on it

[Andy Dodd]

If I recall correctly, there were a few classic arcade games that were copy protected by a battery-backed encryption key. Mess with the device the wrong way and the key would be lost.

easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Cut off the finger stick in mouth then use.

Won't help you

[Lorens]

Against the trojan on the computer you hook it up to.

The knife might be useful for cutting off your finger though.

Excuses, Excuses

[kiehlster]

Teacher, I swear I wrote up the entire 40 page paper, but I burned my thumb really bad the other day and when I went to retrieve my paper, it exploded.

2 Hours?

[complete loony]

Only 2 hours? What are they scared that this thing will be crackable in 3? Seriously, if you are buying one of these to keep something secret on, and you lose it. It will have to remain resistant to attacks for way longer than that.

This is (of course) just a cheap publicity stunt.

PICS!

[leuk_he]

Here is a picture of the launch event. (safe for work. Really!) Surely a hacker who looks like that must be a expert in hacking USB sticks. ;)

My wife has cold fingers 90% of the time.

[BrentRJones]

So she could not use the device. Security should have fingerprint, strong password, challenge question and voice recognition.

What if they just breathe at the sensor?

[Ihlosi]

No detached fingers necessary. Many scanners can be fooled by "reactivating" the most recent fingerprint with the moisture in the exhaled air.

And _really_ professional fingerprint scanners don't check temperature, they check blood oxygen saturation and pulse. That makes cutting of any appendages pretty much a non-issue - it's easier to fool the thing with a dummy finger (or the actual finger that's still attached to the unconscious or otherwise compliant owner) than trying to simulate blood oxygen saturation and pulse with a detached finger.

Re:What if they just breathe at the sensor?

[jridley]

Not this one, it's a linear sensor, you have to swipe your finger over it, and it reads sequentially.

Re:What if they just breathe at the sensor?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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...

Re:What if they just breathe at the sensor?

[mcgrew]

But why bother with all that Rube Goldberg crap when you can put a gun to his head and a knife at his crotch? "Put your finger on the scanner or we cut your balls off" would pretty much do it for anybody.

Re:What if they just breathe at the sensor?

[Ihlosi]

Exposing blood to air gives your pretty decent oxygen saturation.

Only if you create a _huge_ surface area. Exposing a drop of blood to air doesn't saturate it at all. There's a reason why the inside of your lungs have a surface area about the size of a tennis court.

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?

Much, much easier than trying the same with a detached finger. That's why there's no reason for chopping off any appendages. Unless you're a really, really dumb criminal.

Re:What if they just breathe at the sensor?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Just do it like they did on mythbusters. Pull a print, make a thin copy, put it on your own thumb, swipe. Your body heat would work just as well.

Hell, on CSI they managed to get prints from a bloated water logged corpse by cutting the fingers off, removing the bones, and using the finger meat as a glove.

If you want to get in you'll get in.

Re:What if they just breathe at the sensor?

[Tekfactory]

Funny the story only says Fingerprint scanner and Thermal Sensor, but even thermal + pulse can be fooled by making the fake fingerprint very thin, and applying it to the end of your own finger, unless you don't have a body temperature and pulse.

Mythbusters did it on the Crimes and Mythdemeanors episode, and I consider the fingerprint overlay patch, and Jamie's Marks-a-lot fingerprint enhancement to be improvements over the original $20 Gummy Bear attack from a Japanese researcher in 2002 that they were copying.

The original researcher enhanced the fingerprint details in photoshop, Jamie blew up the image in a copier and connected broken lines with a marker and shrunk the image back down.

The rest of the details Photo Etched Circuit board, silicon/ballistics gel/gummi bears are pretty much unchanged.

A small flaw in the test plan...

[WWWWolf]

"...if they could break into the USB drive within two hours. They failed."

Am I completely deluded if I think that if crackers have a physical access to a USB drive, they just may be able to withhold it for more than two hours? Maybe I'm proposing a completely implausible scenario here, but suppose the USB drive has been "stolen" (a term which means "physically removed from the possession of the legitimate owner" for those who don't grok this high-tech security lingo) - in such case, the legitimate owner may, theoretically, need more than 2 hours to recover the USB drive, and the attacker can use a longer period of time to their advantage. I remember reading in the literature that "stolen" USB drives may, in some cases, be recovered days, weeks, months later - and in many cases, they may never be recovered. Whether that qualifies as significantly longer than 2 hours, I don't know. I'm not an expert.

In case you're wondering, no, I don't put much faith in hacking contests, especially if the scenarios they test have small obvious flaws like this. =)

Re:Don't Need One...

[datapharmer]

You must have one crazy washing machine. I find them in the bottom of the wash all the time and as long as I let them dry out first I haven't had one fail yet. Not that I would recommend running them through the wash intentionally, but....

Not sure about being run over by cars through; a titanium cased one perhaps?

Extreme cooling

[Henk Poley]

It burns the inside when opened? Let's see what happens when you pry it open while pouring liquid helium over it.

This reminds me of the IBM Secure Cryptoprocessors, which are *pretty much* physically secure. But still people get in now and then usually through software or neat stasis tricks so the device can't respond to your intrusion.

You're naive.

[Suzuran]

Last week in Texas, three men with assault rifles attempted to ambush and execute a family of four to steal the rims from their SUV. Human life is worthless to criminals.

Re:You're naive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Human life is worthless to criminals.

Human life is worthless to murderers. The term criminals covers a wide variety of law-breakers from litterers to mass-murderers.

Re:You're naive.

[Ihmhi]

With the insane amount of laws most industrialized nations have on the books, everyone is a criminal. They like it that way. They'll always have something to hold over your head to get you to cooperate.

Take an afternoon, head to your local library, and just read up on your local laws - city, town, county, whatever the smallest area of government you can narrow it down to. Good luck figuring that stuff out, much less following every single one without breaking any.

I predict

[Anonymous Coward]

that within 1-2 months we will find out that:

1) the finger print scanner is not actually linked to the encryption key, but is just to "power on" the device.

2) the encryption key is processed in host (windoze) based software and that a usb control packet (the exact same packet for all devices) is simply sent to the onboard controller to tell it to "allow access".

3) the encryption, while purporting to be aes256, is so poorly implimented that it in effect becomes a 16-bit key, thereby becoming brute-forcable on an old C-64 in only 2 days.

2 hours?

[Lord Bitman]

Some mornings I can't get into my own e-mail account in under two hours, why so low? Why not.. three?

Here's guessing a blogger will get into one by next month.

Article is exaggerating things just a tad...

[AllynM]

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

WTF!?

[kpainter]

The self destruct mechanism link in TFA is a link to a review of Ironkey's self destruct. I was going to say, this isn't anything new. I had a Sandisk brick itself when it could not be ejected. We switched to Ironkey. We havn't had any problems with these and the encryption is hardware based so it is pretty fast. There is an option to have the drive be capable of being reformatted if you can't enter the password within 10 attempts.

I have not had a lot of love for fingerprint scanners readers. I think I will stay with Ironkey.

Re:No secure USB Stick

[Andy Dodd]

http://www.spyrus.com/ - Right now, about the only people I would trust are IronKey and these guys. IronKey has the benefit of working under Linux though.

Victorinox

[Ukab the Great]

When are they going to make a USB Stick with a corkscrew? I might just need to recover with a bottle of wine after my thumb drive destroys itself.

A good Offensive is teh best Defense...

[DarthVain]

Rather than try to "protect" the data contained within a thumb stick (which is kind of passive if you think about it), why not actively try to destroy all data to whatever is connected to the thumb stick instead...

Criminal: "Ha! I stole this thumb stick from that stupid corporation, and I am sure it is just stuffed with credit card info! Now to just use these easily available utilities I found online to crack it..."
Plugs in device
PC: "Password: "
Criminal: "Pffft I can just ignore that, now where did I put that cracker utility..."
PC: "Timeout. Initiating self destruct!"
Criminal: "Pfft as if it is going to blow up or something, what a joke..."
PC: "Virus Loaded....Deleting all files.... Complete. Have a nice day!"
Criminal: "....."
Criminal: "....."