Slashdot Mirror
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."
Oh, and you generally don't do a tamper 'proof' coating on screws, you do a 'tamper-evident' coating.
Want your own tamper evident coating? Buy a bottle of the cheapest, cheesiest glitter nail polish you can find. Coat the screws with a layer. Take a high resolution picture of each screw. Suspect tampering? compare the current coating with the picture.
As for deleting the data off the device, I'd probably simply encrypt everything on the device, with the key stored in a specific chip designed to dump said key if anything triggers it. No Key = No Data.
I don't read AC A human right
Will it run Slashdot Beta?
The self-destruction mechanism uses Slashdot Beta code to perform the operation.
"screws with a tamper-proof coating, revealing if a person has tried to disassemble it"
I'm pretty sure I would notice if someone took a dremel to my phone.
I see they're using the same battery technology they used in the Dreamliner then.
A hundred and twenty characters ought to be enough for anyone...