Tyler Durden wrote:

"I wonder how quickly one could incinerate a memory card in the field with high success rate? Destroy the data and the passphrases don't help."

Well, what if there were 3 passwords:

1) One for Fake data, for amatuers (very few of the MwG will actually be smart enough to look beyond this...that's why they have guns) 2)One for real data...this is what you're hiding 3) One for plausible real data, BUT when this one's used, it also destroys the real data as it opens the plausible real data.

Of course, some really really smart MwG (or the cool suits standing behind them) will be able to detect that data is being destroyed, but statistically speaking that will be much rarer.

-TD

Whats your threat model? If the prospective attacker has state-level resources, this will always fail. There are a number of guides online describing how attackers should deal with computer data. One of the most basic is they *never* run the attackees software on the original disk. Step one is always to make a bit-level mirror of the entire hard drive, and work with a copy of that. Step zero is to pull the power, so any shutdown code does not run. Any protective scheme which relies on the attacker inadvertantly activating software is doomed from the start. If you're dealing with a state-level attacker, any scheme involving explosives or incendiaries would get the attackee in as much or more trouble than the original data would. This is a hard problem. I suspect any solution will involve tamper-resistant hardware, which zeroizes itself if not used in the expected mode. Peter Trei