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Inside Boeing's New Self-Destructing Smartphone
mpicpp writes "It looks thicker than most of the phones you see at Best Buy, but Boeing's first smartphone isn't meant to be used by the average person. The company that's known for its airplanes is joining the smartphone game with the Boeing Black, targeted at people that work in the security and defense industry. One of its security features is self-destructing if it gets into the wrong hands, although not quite in the Mission Impossible sense. According to the company's letter to the FCC, the phone will have screws with a tamper-proof coating, revealing if a person has tried to disassemble it. 'Any attempt to disassemble the device would trigger functions that would delete the data and software contained within the device and make the device inoperable,' writes Bruce Olcott, an attorney for Boeing."
When I worked in the ATM industry we already had that feature built into the keypad (EPP). If you tried to extract the keys any number of ways (freeze spray, remove back cover, cut front cover, etc.) it would dump the memory and leave the attacker with nothing. All you have to do is contact one of the companies that built those EPP's and they can guide you into a LOW COST hardware method of dumping everything. You don't need to go with a fancy "custom coating" that might fail or have alternative issues. I would not buy this phone as it is over-priced, and I can do the same thing with a common android smartphone and a little software and hardware tweaking. Epoxy is your friend for keeping people out of things they don't need to see, as is encryption with delete upon failure to decrypt. What a joke, but they will sell a bunch of them to Gov. and "special" people.