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Comment by ConstantineXVI | Hacker News Reader

It's much easier to make a SD card unavailable (destroyed, "lost", etc.) vs. an entire laptop, and you wouldn't be as vulnerable if a third party got a hold of the laptop (since all the valuable data is sitting in your wallet (on your person) instead of the briefcase (in the seat next to you)).

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Well In my case the data actually is in the laptop and encrypted, but the SD card only disables logging in on the PC, even if they crack my password.

Unless your SD card contains something vital to access of your data (encryption key, etc), all that setup does is protect your data from people who try to use your laptop in a coffeeshop while you're in the john. Still nothing stopping one from taking the entire laptop, removing the drive, and mounting it in another system.

The encryption key could be a function of his login password and it could be stored in-memory after he is logged in. The issue is to have a trigger which wipes it from memory by logging out the current user when the police shows up, and unplugging the SD is a nice trigger for that.

That's at least what I imagined, his setup might be completely different (a keyboard combination for logging out might also work better).

Basically the SD card contains encrypted key which is required to be mounted while logged into the PC. If I pull the card away the PC will automatically shutdown.

if the SD card is not mounted when the user logs in the system is automatically shutdown too.

Basically the SD card only fights against using the computer. You of course could remove the hard drive and mount it in another computer, but that is why the whole drive is encrypted.

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