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Comment by ropiwqefjnpoa | Hacker News Reader

The article keeps saying "self-destruct" but that's not what happens.

But if your hard drive is encrypted, this is a pretty good solution for most people.

Maybe if you can get BusKill to activate a mini thermite explosive under your hard drive.

I remember watching a Defcon conference where they tested different methods for destroying a hard drive in place. And they found that thermite actually doesn't damage the platters (well at least not enough for data to be unrecoverable).

Hard drive platters are surprisingly heat/chemical resistant. I think they found that the best method was to physically destroy the platters.

I remember watching that talk years ago. I was disappointed in the lack of rigor of their conclusions.

The whole point of thermite-based HDD destruction is to get the platens over the Curie temperature so the magnetic field is gone, not to physically destroy them. They point this out in the start, but then never talk about whether this was achieved or not in their experiment (assumably so they could go on to the actual explosives).

It was entertainment, and I'd take any results with a grain of salt.

The guy worked on it further. He eventually solved the original challenge.

Highly recommended by me, too: Zoz at DefCon 23, entitled "And That's How I Lost My Other Eye...Explorations in Data Destruction"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y

Did they test SSDs?

Making it self-destruct is the easy part, just change "DISPLAY=:0 xscreensaver-command -lock" to "sudo rm -rf /" or whatever you like. It's understandable that the author didn't want to put a destructive command in his example configuration.

Assuming you were actually going to use something like this, you're likely using full disk encryption.

At that point, the better option would be (IMO) to simply blow away the first 2 MB or so of your disk (where the LUKS master key is stored), run a "sync", and execute an immediate "reboot -f" (along with, perhaps, the other options that skip spitting out the warning message, writing an entry to utmp/wtmp or whatever, and so on).

There wouldn't be a real need to actually zero/wipe the entire drive (which would take a bit, even at SSD speeds).

A drive wipe might take too long though, especially if they grab the laptop and shut if off. After a simple shutdown or lock, disk encryption really is the primary protection here.

Change encryption key to random value, discard random value.

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