From: Panzer Boy <panzer@drown.slip.andrew.cmu.edu>
[...]
Blowing things up is nice and all but also lacks style (unless you nuke).
ROTFL ... I'd also second whoever mentioned not destroying evidence (and your own data remember? if there is actually a chance you get it back)
Basically a permently encrypted harddrive would be fine. Every boot up you need to enter a password. If the screen saver kicks in, you have to enter a password, or it reboots. Stuff like this.
Yes, that's probably the best way as otherwise moving disks to an other machine would bypass the protection. Still booting if no or wrong password is good too. But let's add something else: It may be possible (easy?) to hide a partition on the disk: buy two hard drives from a family with different capacity and same packages. Move the labels of the small one to the big one. Discard the small one :-) Use partitions corresponding to the capacity of the small one to store boring un-encrypted material, software, etc... Fix the scsi controller on the drive (re-program) to self-identify with the smaller format, but to obey access commands to the hidden area. You now have a computer and disk drive that boots as a boring system, with a medium size drive, but if you know about it, you can access an other partition of encrypted stuff. The (even not so) casual inspection of the stolen or confiscated system reveals only stuff that is not worth spending time on. Only a very detailed inspection, or a leak, reveals the encrypted stuff, still encrypted... Very frustrating. Of course, if your backups were not encrypted or if you wrote down the keys... This solution is even compatible with using a BIOS ROM glued to the motherboard that prevents unauthorized use of the computer. The hard drive and the motherboard are protected by two different mechanisms. Pierre. pierre@shell.portal.com