Absolutely, I was just thinking about how to do it cheap and simple.
There was an old Defcon talk about something similar, how to make a system to physically destroy hard drives using a mechanism inside a server that could be triggered automatically or remotely.
They tried a bunch of things from thermite to acids, but didn’t get anywhere really.
It made me think however…
What about injecting sand into the drives and actuating the read/write head?
I have seen photos of a hard drive crash, where the head grinded off all of the magnetic layer from the platters.
My idea was to inject sand as a grinding agent and use the read/write head as a grinder to do the same thing.
Then I realized that if you are a huge customer, you can probably have custom hard drives on order, these drives could have a dedicated physical grinding arm, designed so that once deployed it would quickly grind the magnetic layer off of the platters.
Now SSD have made these concepts mostly redundant, but still a fun thought experiment.
You can put safety checks on the cabinet
Temperature sensors, sensors on cabinet drawers/doors etc
And do a system wipe if that happens
Those kinds of systems are used in a ton of other places already. Cars for example
Absolutely, I was just thinking about how to do it cheap and simple.
There was an old Defcon talk about something similar, how to make a system to physically destroy hard drives using a mechanism inside a server that could be triggered automatically or remotely.
They tried a bunch of things from thermite to acids, but didn’t get anywhere really.
It made me think however…
What about injecting sand into the drives and actuating the read/write head?
I have seen photos of a hard drive crash, where the head grinded off all of the magnetic layer from the platters.
My idea was to inject sand as a grinding agent and use the read/write head as a grinder to do the same thing.
Then I realized that if you are a huge customer, you can probably have custom hard drives on order, these drives could have a dedicated physical grinding arm, designed so that once deployed it would quickly grind the magnetic layer off of the platters.
Now SSD have made these concepts mostly redundant, but still a fun thought experiment.
None of that is necessary these days; all you need is to scrub the encryption keya from RAM and cache.
The issue is reliably detecting tampering without undue false alarms.
Just encrypt the drive and store the key somewhere easier to destroy.