Or use an accelerometer in the box that will shut down the machine if it is moved without prior authorization.
Could be attached to the SMBus. An Arduino as an I2C slave should do. With hard power shutdown as a backup ater a timeout if soft shutdown would fail.
Burning a disk takes a lot of energy. Such assembly runs a risk of burning the house down if mistriggered.
A tamper-detecting circuit with the disk key in RAM, that will erase the key if moved without authorization, if duress code is entered, or if wrong unlock code is entered n times, could work quite better.
A small pyro charge then can burn the little SMD chip, if you desire the visual/olfactory effects and make it evident to the adversary that they won’t get anything today.
If you have an hour to burn, This DEF CON presentation covers it, plus some fun applications of shaped charges. (The oil well perforators are particularly fun.)
It seems to me like the DoD should be taken to court for willfully trying to prevent and block a freedom of information request. Really this sort of response is unacceptable. if the president asked for a full report on hotplugs on his desk by the end of the week you damn well better believe they could pull something together. They are being willing obstructionists by throwing the scope and price of this request into the range that they did, and that is criminal and contrary to the intent of the law.
What if we all took this approach? Well I would answer the police officer’s or court’s question, but there is the small matter of my million dollar a minute consulting fee.
“Why yes, IRS auditor, I do have all my receipts and account information. But I can’t furnish them to you without spending 18 months and charging you $900,000 to make sure they’re the right receipts and the right accounts.”
Who in their right mind is keeping incriminating data unencrypted? Not just full volume encryption, which is obviously defeated as long as the user is logged in, but individual file level encryption. If I had anything remotely sensitive that I didn’t want law enforcement (or the DoD!) to access, keeping my computer powered up and my user logged in and my screensaver inactive wouldn’t allow them to read it.
Of course there are ways around that too — keyloggers, Van Eck, probably more arcane methods I don’t even know about — but the Hotplug is only going to catch people who are so inattentive that they’d get caught regardless.
I seem to recall that some industrial fabricators have GPS and inertial sensors that prevent the machine from being moved in a functional state., allegedly to comply with the Waasenaar Arangement. Might have been mentioned on boingboing once upon a time.
And that’s why I would like the world where even the big machines are opensource enough, or possible to get retrofitted, that they can be user-modified, including removing crap like this.
Machining both nano and mega should be available to all, not just to those who are Approved by some council of self-important bureaucrats.
I actually discussed ways to actively compensate the machine frame vibrations and deformations so even lower-end machines can be highly accurate. Reportedly it was tried but then abandoned because it increased power consumption too much. But it may not be a problem in some other contexts, so I should ask more details…
Depends if the President happens to be one of those ‘Murican hatin’ Democrats! Seriously though, I wouldn’t put it past them to find creative ways out of obeying even the Executive Office of the President. Secret police don’t tend to make the most reliable public servants.
It would be interesting to know, when approaching this problem, how much you gain by weak, but novel and non-obvious, anti-tamper mechanisms vs. tougher systems that are more likely to clue the attacker in to the fact that this is a special case they are dealing with.
For something produced on a commercial scale, the element of surprise is obviously shot; but for your once-off hack that watches the HDD fall protection accelerometer for abnormal movement and triggers a shutdown the adversary might walk right into it, at least the first time.
I wonder if it depends on how high profile the matter is: presumably Officer Donut vs. Suspected Pothead just doesn’t get the good forensics guys, so they are likely to repeat mistakes. A higher profile matter might get a lot more care applied, making comparatively weak measures that rely on surprise more of a problem.
