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

[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

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/538/

Two hours?

[mog007]

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

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?

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. =)

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.

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.