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Mission Possible: Self-Destructing Phones Are Now a Reality (yahoo.com)
drunkdrone quotes the International Business Times: Self-destructing gadgets favored by the likes of James Bond and Mission: Impossible's Ethan Hunt have taken one step closer to reality. Researchers in Saudi Arabia have developed a mechanism that, when triggered, can destroy a smartphone or other electronic device in as little as 10 seconds. The self-destruct mechanism has been created by electrical engineers at the King Abdulla University of Science and Technology and consists of a polymer layer that rapidly expands when subjected to temperatures above 80 degrees Celsius, effectively bursting the phone open from the inside. The mechanism can be adapted to be triggered in various ways, including remotely through a smartphone app or when it's subjected to pressure.
Once triggered, power from the device's battery is directed to electrodes that rapidly heat, causing the polymer layer to expand to around seven times its original size within 10-15 seconds. This crushes the vital components inside the device, destroying any information stored on board.
One engineer believes the phone will see adoption in the intelligence and financial communities, though it can also be retrofitted to existing phones for just $15. This raises an interesting question -- would you want a self-destructing phone?
Once triggered, power from the device's battery is directed to electrodes that rapidly heat, causing the polymer layer to expand to around seven times its original size within 10-15 seconds. This crushes the vital components inside the device, destroying any information stored on board.
One engineer believes the phone will see adoption in the intelligence and financial communities, though it can also be retrofitted to existing phones for just $15. This raises an interesting question -- would you want a self-destructing phone?
Prior art: Samsung.
This message will self destruct in 10 seconds!
The real question isn't if you want one but if it would be legal. If the cops pull you over and you destroy your phone will that be considered destroying evidence? Will the government outlaw it? If they were unhappy with unhackable iPhones they're gonna go ape over this.
On how long for this technology to be declared illegal for civilian ownership in the United States (and of course the PRC, but the bet is for States-side)?
Does that guys really can think it is much more practical to destroy all data in memory chips(even it might burn all semiconductors in chips, without physical outer damage) , and just such way will render phone useless , or they can't think out of scope "exploding suicidal phone"?
Better than "software only" suicide, yes, it removes the value in the device.
But blowing a difficult-to-replace electronic fuse after zapping the memory would be simply and easier for such a purpose, and also be a device that would be allowed on the plane.
We're trying to STOP phones being dangerous, not make them more so.
And properly controlled and encrypted devices have an automatic protection against theft of data - it's called the encryption. Remove the encryption key or store it on a TPM chip if you have to. Better - put it on a TPM chip where the self-destruct features just clears the chip. Cheaper, simpler, safer, and can be done with existing devices.
"This crushes the vital components inside the device, destroying any information stored on board."
Excuse me? You're trying to crush a chunk of silicon wrapped in epoxy (a flash chip) using reaction force generated by a case designed to be as thin and light as possible and not designed to withstand internal pressure?
I think the case is far easier to pop than the chip is to crush.
Somehow I doubt this actually makes things unrecoverable.
Yep... That'll take care of the phones too. As well as cars, transport, urban sprawl, light pollution, pollution, police abuses, police, and Electoral College. All the evil known personally to today's humans, in other words.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I don't understand the need for some sort of special polymer layer or whatever... if you wanna make something that's either automated or dependant of some sort of command, just make a needle module to puncture the Li-po battery.
Perhaps they wanted to avoid the Samsung lawsuit? xD
I doubt that last part rather strongly. A local police department may be stumbled getting the child porn out of a phone so destroyed, but an FBI lab will have no problem.
I thought, they'll release a drop of special acid onto the memory chip. But 80 degrees Celsius is not all that hot... Overclockers, supposedly, go up to 85 before their computers crash. The memory ought to avoid permanent damage at even higher temperatures.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
...To initiate self-destruct you just drop it in a bucket of dirty water and leave if for a few hours. :-(
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
The real problem is buying a phone or a SIM that's not registered in your name. Since most governments archive the communications anyway, destroying the device accomplishes nothing except to give you away.
Now to destroy the device in a visible way may have some value, but wouldn't it be more reliable to simply put some thermite around the memory modules so as to destroy the memristors beyond recovery without having the phone expand into an ugly wad of polymer?
Would you want to fly on a plane knowing the dipstick next to you had one of these? Or how about in a hazardous or flammable environment?
Look for these to be banned from commercial airline flights and be prohibited in lots of other places.
And of course that's not even getting into the "what if someone hacks it and makes it self-destruct" question. Not that a bad guy would ever do that, nooooo.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
This seems like a rather touchy solution looking for a problem.
Unless you really enjoy buying replacement hardware; the need to have battery power in order to trigger the kill switch is a problem. If you don't configure the device to self-destruct when its battery is on the verge of no longer having enough energy to perform a self destruct; all the attacker has to do is run the battery down. If you do configure it that way, forgetting to put it on the charger could get expensive and tedious rather fast(in addition to the various other issues that can interrupt battery power: overtemp protection kicking in in a hot car; current delivery capability falling under freezing conditions, etc.)
Plus, the battery, and its connection to the logic boards, tend to be among the larger and more obvious parts of a modern electronic widget. That makes them good candidates for controlled disconnection/destruction, even if you can't open the case without tripping some sort of anti-tamper mechanism.
Finding a good self-destruct temperature is also a bit tricky. The lower you go, the closer you get to the high end of normal operating conditions or the 'device won't operate; but should not be permanently damaged' range. 80 degrees is high for flash memory; but most CPUs will be happy enough to run that hot. The higher you go; the more power you need to be able to deliver to kick off the destruction; and the more vulnerable you are to an attacker who is able to apply coolant to slow you down; limit current or voltage delivered to the resistive heater, or both.
A fuse is useless.
It's already known that phone thieves are desoldering, rewriting, reballing, and resoldering memory chips on iPhones to defeat Find My iPhone. Replacing a SMD fuse is trivial in comparison.
You're on the phone, and someone blows up your phone to seven times its original size and 80 degrees Celsius when it's right next to your ear... Doesn't seem like the wisest idea.
Oh, it has its uses.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I don't think so. Unless you hammer flash-memory into a fine powder, no deletion is taking place with purely mechanical approaches. And unless you have a very sturdy shell around the phone, a flash-chip may not even suffer any damage at all as it requires a _lot_ of force to crack the casing.
This is just another stupid stunt.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
With just a little heat, and cell phone destruction is their best application?
I think you are missing the obvious market
I'd be willing to wait ~.5 - 1 second for a cap to build up to charge and trigger.
Nearly every iPhone I have owned self destructed. The glass broke because it looked at it funny. The battery would become weak as a kitten because I abused it by actually charging and then using it. The touch sensor would start to ignore me. The sound regularly would go to crap. And with every OS upgrade on a slightly older model the phones would take another step toward the edge.
So, WOW, Apple gave me a free feature that I did even appreciate.
Twenty years ago we were doing remote software updates, an early step of which was to erase existing flash. It would essentially make the device self destructed if we'd have stopped there. Doing any more is kinda pointless unless you really need to see smoke come out.
This raises an interesting question -- would you want a self-destructing phone?
The surveillance-state boosters will phrase that as "this raises an interesting question -- why would you want a self-destructing phone?
Owning one would make you automatically suspect.
I don't even want a phone at all, I just communicate over IP or IRL
Twinstiq, game news
No, fascist countries like Cuba, America prior to 2/2017 (Under Obama, one of the worst fascists of this century. He put millions of people at risk with his mohamadism), Brazil, etc.
crushing google's servers to eliminate the automatic backup the user forgot to disable.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.