Self-Destructing USB Stick Sold as Un-Hackable

Hugh Pickens writes: "PC World reports that Victorinox, maker of the legendary Swiss Army Knife, has launched a new super-secure memory stick that sounds like something out of Mission: Impossible. The Secure Pro USB comes in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB sizes, and provides a variety of security measures including fingerprint identification, a thermal sensor, and even a self-destruct mechanism. Victorinox says the Secure is "the most secure [device] of its kind available to the public." The Secure features a fingerprint scanner and a thermal sensor "so that the finger alone, detached from the body, will still not give access to the memory stick's contents." The product uses an integrated Single Chip Technology, so that there are no external and accessible lines between the different coding/security steps, as on multi-chip solutions making cracking the hardware impossible. Then there's the self-destruct mechanism. While offering no explanation of how it works, Victorinox will only say that if someone tries to forcibly open the memory stick it triggers a self-destruct mechanism that "irrevocably burns [the Secure's] CPU and memory chip." At a contest held in London, Victorinox put its money where its mouth was and put the Secure Pro to the test offering a £100,000 cash prize ($149,000) to a team of professional hackers if they could break into the USB drive within two hours. They failed."

Giving you the finger

[stovicek]

The Secure features a fingerprint scanner and a thermal sensor "so that the finger alone, detached from the body, will still not give access to the memory stick's contents.

If it comes to removing fingers from a body in order to access the drive, it shouldn't be that much harder to figure out how to raise the temperature of the finger to body temp. I am interested to see what Bruce Schneier has to say about this new chip.

Re:

[Metrathon]

Plus you have the other features of the tool to "hack" it with!

Re:

[pearl298]

Many years ago the US DOD was concerned about access to nuclear weapons and came up with a similar scheme.

Take away the marketing hype and the same engineering/physics problems remain - there is NO way to reliably tell if the "hand" (finger/eye ball/whatever) is alive or dead!

This makes no difference if it is gaining access to slashdot (at least *I* wouldn't kill to get mod points LOL), but it is a serious problem with nuclear weapons.