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Press a button and this SSD will self-destruct with all your data (www.theverge.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 1 point 11 months ago (7 children)

I mean, it could just be a capacitor. It's easier to fry something than make it delete itself

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (6 children)

    Capacitor wouldn't allow long enough to wipe the data first. It's a two pass system. Wipe data then destroy. Also capacitors lose charge over time much, much more quickly than a battery. You still would need to have plugged it in very recently. And yes to build enough voltage to destroy electronics physically and quickly with a battery, it would actually probably need both battery and capacitors anyway which would also increase size. I'm guessing it was a tradeoff of size vs functionality, but having it not work until it's plugged in after pressing the button which is bright red when pressed, seems like a very simple way to bypass the destruction by simply disassembling it before plugging it in. Only good if the thief/agent doesn't know why there's a big red spot on it before plugging it in, which is a bad assumption for security especially if you deploy these widely so everyone knows what they are.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (5 children)

    Why are you wiping the data? Why not just slag the whole chip... Hard to read an SSD in liquid form

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (4 children)

    What if the destruction fails, or isn't thorough. Much harder to retrieve information from a partial block of memory if it has also been overwritten with garbage to erase it. Redundancy is essential to security.

    A device like that isn't putting enough voltage into it to "melt" it. It you want it that well destroyed you're going to need a high temperature incinerator with a good filter since it's not safe to breath the smoke it will create. Or at the very least a heating element inside it, but then you need layers of heat protection so it doesn't catch everything around it on fire or burn the person pushing the button.

    This isn't that. This is meant to destroy the data at a moment's notice with the push of a button. Problem is that it has to be plugged in to do it, which in my mind is defeating the purpose.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (3 children)

    I mean, you could probably pick two strategic pins and fry the wells... You might have to do a few of them to make sure that your hit every bank. If you blow through the insulation between them, I can't imagine any method could recover the data. And it shouldn't take much current

    The liquid thing was just because... You know, solid state drive

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, but again, that requires precise destruction in a cheap chip while making sure both not to do it accidentally and making sure it's successful afterwards. With redundancy, if one thing fails, there's something else to do the job. Most corporations have abandoned this idea in exchange for short term profit and planned obsolescence. But it's actually super important in real security.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    But like... You could just make it physical. Put a couple extra leads on the PCB, charge the capacitor, and let the button close the circuit mechanically. You might have to do a couple tests, but that's better than having storage with a delete button on it

    What does a delete button add? It'll take minutes. Might as well put an e-stop button on your desk that connects to your computer by USB

    It's basically security theatre

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    But charge the capacitor with what? That's the point. If it doesn't kill the data immediately upon pushing the button, even when unplugged, it's useless unless some bumbling idiot thief/cop/agent plugs it in before just disarming the button.

    And as for fully physical, do tests with what? Another computer? Its a memory storage device with only an I/O driver and basic firmware. There's no CPU to separately run software to detect if the components are destroyed. And if there were, that would have to be physically/electrically separated from the short that is going to kill the device and then physically reconnected, which would mean some kind of mechanical device most likely. Now were getting into a huge device, not a flash drive. The device already has capabilities to read and write data. Very easy to add a chip to give that random data to write over the existing data and a lot less power than a processor and motorized components.

    And again, it doesn't solve the redundancy problem. Single point of failure is always going to go wrong at least one in some number of cases. Even top of the line components and the best quality control available can't beat redundancy and it's way, way cheaper.

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