General Musing

In continuation of my article: Data Erasing for your own Protection I got into a discussion about other ways to protect you data from law enforcement.

I was told by a former law enforcement member that after the crime scene has been secured that the the computer tech checks the computer is functional and then has the equivalent of a mover ship the computer, like a box, to the computer lab. The issue with this being that a mercury switch and power source could be used to zap the computer with the needed Gauss to erase/destroy the hard disk.

Another method would be to use a RAM Disk, whether this is a physical^[1] or virtual RAM Disk. The first has the advantage that in the case of a brownout the data is saved for X hours, although this could be a disadvantage too, another disadvantage is that you may have a memory limit which is imposed by the hardware. The advantage over the physical RAM disk is that a higher amount of memory can be allocated, although you don’t get the protection from brownouts.

Important to also remember is that there is also a data remanence with data in RAM^[2], which also should to be mitigated. This may be possible by passing an electric charge over the memory to erase them, although I have yet to find relevant references.

A third method may be by raising the temperature of the hard disk to above the Curie Point^[3], which with effect the magnetics of the disk. I will need to investigate this more too.

Embedding part of the computer in epoxy still applies to all the above.

1. Gigabyte I-RAM DDR PCI Virtual RAM Disk Drive SATA W/ Backup Battery – backup power lasts ~16 hours and it supports 4Gb RAM.
2. Data remanence: Data in RAM
3. Curie Point

Image source: Michiel2005