I think there was a point that I hadn't elucidated on in my post which you noted. I was focusing on securing software from prying eyes rather than worrying about the hardware that contained such information.
The system I suggested is applicable primarily when the value of the software (programs or information) outweighs the value of the hardware. Under these circumstances, the user will be less concerned about the $2000 piece of hardware than the $250,000 worth of information on that hardware.
Much of the operations planning I'm working on for a local company involves the use of laptops while en route to sites. The laptops themselves don't contain any private information, relying upon a central (secured) station to host that data, so the theft of information is less of a concern in these situations than that of the hardware.
When it comes to theft of hardware, there's no level of technology that'll prevent the theft itself once the laptop has been obtained. Your comment on espionage hit the nail on the head, though, which is where the encryption comes into play. (They should still be tossed in jail if they've chosen to ignore their training and be complete doughnuts.;)
This isn't to say that these students don't have a market; however, they've focused on the wrong segment of the overall IT market. Devices like these should be marketed to top-level execs who can fork over five times the price they're planning on charging.
Instead, use encrypted filesystem technology linked with the sensoring these guys have already envisioned. Said filesystem (whether it's stand-alone or hosted by FAT32/Ext3/etc) would remain encrypted, and access to it is granted only when the user's fob is within range.
This removes the annoyance of an audible alarm, and requires a thief steal both the laptop AND the fob, assuming he/she knew a fob was even being used.
As an added bonus, if the fob is turned off, it ain't detected by the laptop. So the filesystem is now unusable. Combined with keyboard-based logins, this system would provide quite a bit of convenience.
Pretty cool stuff. I love seeing engineering students come up with new tech.
Over a decade back, while I was in high school, I would spent countless hours in the computer lab working on some game or devilish scheme. This was prior to the massive Stoned Virus outbreak the school suffered.
The computer lab had one colour system, the rest being monochrome. The colour system would be the one my instructor and I traded back and forth between each other, laying the perfect arena for my evil.
Two pranks were played in the computer lab by me. The first was the old school "hard drive format" joke. I had built my own command.com interpreter (some lame version of MSDOS, like 3.0, was being used) and ran it on top of the standard DOS interpreter. After a random number of commands were typed, it would ignore the current command and perform the same on-screen interaction of the format.exe command instead of presuming standard operation.
In fact, the first user to encounter this little gem was the CS instructor. Upon being asked if he would like to format C:, he typed "n" and the system happily responded "yes" and began to "format the drive". He couldn't Ctrl-C it by any means, and he sat there for a moment before calling my name, relying on my expertise to handle this as with many problems before. (Not all caused by me, fortunately.)
So, I went through the usual DIR options, and said to him, "Give me a few minutes with this. I should be able to recover your filesystem." Punch in the exit code, play a couple games of MORIA, then exit and tell him he can continue with his work. "Probably a keyboard error," I lied, "so I'd keep an eye on the system."
The second was during my TSR phase (Terminate-Stay-Resident, like daemons or any other background process, I guess). Every few hours, a happy face would come bouncing along the text screen, then normal operations would resume. It took a few days for someone to come across this thing:>
Oh yeah, and these were both coded using Turbo Pascal 3.0. Hee hee. THE POWER, BABY.
Slashdot Mirror
The system I suggested is applicable primarily when the value of the software (programs or information) outweighs the value of the hardware. Under these circumstances, the user will be less concerned about the $2000 piece of hardware than the $250,000 worth of information on that hardware.
Much of the operations planning I'm working on for a local company involves the use of laptops while en route to sites. The laptops themselves don't contain any private information, relying upon a central (secured) station to host that data, so the theft of information is less of a concern in these situations than that of the hardware.
When it comes to theft of hardware, there's no level of technology that'll prevent the theft itself once the laptop has been obtained. Your comment on espionage hit the nail on the head, though, which is where the encryption comes into play. (They should still be tossed in jail if they've chosen to ignore their training and be complete doughnuts. ;)
This isn't to say that these students don't have a market; however, they've focused on the wrong segment of the overall IT market. Devices like these should be marketed to top-level execs who can fork over five times the price they're planning on charging.
[Grins.]
This removes the annoyance of an audible alarm, and requires a thief steal both the laptop AND the fob, assuming he/she knew a fob was even being used.
As an added bonus, if the fob is turned off, it ain't detected by the laptop. So the filesystem is now unusable. Combined with keyboard-based logins, this system would provide quite a bit of convenience.
Pretty cool stuff. I love seeing engineering students come up with new tech.
Over a decade back, while I was in high school, I would spent countless hours in the computer lab working on some game or devilish scheme. This was prior to the massive Stoned Virus outbreak the school suffered.
:>
The computer lab had one colour system, the rest being monochrome. The colour system would be the one my instructor and I traded back and forth between each other, laying the perfect arena for my evil.
Two pranks were played in the computer lab by me. The first was the old school "hard drive format" joke. I had built my own command.com interpreter (some lame version of MSDOS, like 3.0, was being used) and ran it on top of the standard DOS interpreter. After a random number of commands were typed, it would ignore the current command and perform the same on-screen interaction of the format.exe command instead of presuming standard operation.
In fact, the first user to encounter this little gem was the CS instructor. Upon being asked if he would like to format C:, he typed "n" and the system happily responded "yes" and began to "format the drive". He couldn't Ctrl-C it by any means, and he sat there for a moment before calling my name, relying on my expertise to handle this as with many problems before. (Not all caused by me, fortunately.)
So, I went through the usual DIR options, and said to him, "Give me a few minutes with this. I should be able to recover your filesystem." Punch in the exit code, play a couple games of MORIA, then exit and tell him he can continue with his work. "Probably a keyboard error," I lied, "so I'd keep an eye on the system."
The second was during my TSR phase (Terminate-Stay-Resident, like daemons or any other background process, I guess). Every few hours, a happy face would come bouncing along the text screen, then normal operations would resume. It took a few days for someone to come across this thing
Oh yeah, and these were both coded using Turbo Pascal 3.0. Hee hee. THE POWER, BABY.