You can put safety checks on the cabinet
Temperature sensors, sensors on cabinet drawers/doors etc
And do a system wipe if that happens
Those kinds of systems are used in a ton of other places already. Cars for example
Comment on Dutch authorities seized one of Windscribe VPN's servers – here's everything we know
stoy@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I have seen devices that can allow an American power plug to be transfered from one powered outlet to another, specifically to allow police to capture running servers so the RAM isn’t cleared.
I have also heard of RAM being frozen with liquid nitrogen while powered on to allow later analysis.
The first part is less of a problem in this case as the outlets are different here, but to completely defeat this sort of power manipulation servers can easily be designed with internal switches that releases as the server is pulled from the rack, cutting the power internally.
That also reduces the effectiveness of the second attack, which is easy to reduce further by simply making the case take longer to open.
Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
stoy@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Absolutely, I was just thinking about how to do it cheap and simple.
There was an old Defcon talk about something similar, how to make a system to physically destroy hard drives using a mechanism inside a server that could be triggered automatically or remotely.
They tried a bunch of things from thermite to acids, but didn’t get anywhere really.
It made me think however…
What about injecting sand into the drives and actuating the read/write head?
I have seen photos of a hard drive crash, where the head grinded off all of the magnetic layer from the platters.
My idea was to inject sand as a grinding agent and use the read/write head as a grinder to do the same thing.
Then I realized that if you are a huge customer, you can probably have custom hard drives on order, these drives could have a dedicated physical grinding arm, designed so that once deployed it would quickly grind the magnetic layer off of the platters.
Now SSD have made these concepts mostly redundant, but still a fun thought experiment.
SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz 1 day ago
None of that is necessary these days; all you need is to scrub the encryption keya from RAM and cache.
The issue is reliably detecting tampering without undue false alarms.
grue@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Just encrypt the drive and store the key somewhere easier to destroy.
Korkki@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Couldn’t you just set a weekly or daily cronjob to reboot the servers and have some balance loader redirect traffic? No more ram fingerprints after that.
rumba@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Just log nothing. Reconnect circuits often. Shouldn’t be anything in ram but the current connection stream.
Shadow@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Yep came here to say this, it being a ram only server doesn’t really help against government level attacks.
There’s a decent chance the server itself had dual power supplies, in which case you could just unplug one and plug it into a battery and you’re good to go. That simplifies things quite a bit.
stoy@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Ah, yeah, didn’t think of that, good point!