Comment on Press a button and this SSD will self-destruct with all your data

• irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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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  • theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    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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    • irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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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      • theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        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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