Swiss Army Encryption
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Data Protection, Blog, hardware, Security on
Some might argue that a Swiss Army Knife is difficult enough to get into as it is, especially if you have little fat fingers like me. I have trouble opening the thing to get stuff out of horses hooves, for example, but luckily have never found myself in urgent need of this particular tool. Now Victorinox has added another tool to certain Swiss Army Knife models and is boasting about how difficult it is to open, in fact it recently offered a reward of $100,000 to anyone who could open it and the reward went unclaimed.
Just WTF am I going on about this time, you might be wondering although grateful that I’ve dropped the Swiss Cheese talk by now, so let me explain. The tool in question is a USB data drive and the reason it cannot be opened, at least by those not meant to open it, would be the Elliptical Curve and AES encryption that is employed to keep it shut. At CES in Las Vegas, Victorinox threw down a challenge and was so confident that nobody would be able to crack the encryption that it offered that $100K prize to anyone who did. It wasn’t at all surprised that the money went untouched, nor was it concerned about the adverse publicity if it had been. Apparently this Swiss Army Knife also comes with a self-destruct mechanism that would have detected the tampering and destroyed all the data anyway.
Andy Cordial, managing director of the storage systems integration specialist Origin Storage reckons the $100K reward was just the tip of the financial iceberg if anyone had managed the cracking in the couple of hours allotted to each entrant. “If a hacker manages to crack 128-bit AES technology” he says “governments would pay a lot more than $100,000 for the secret”.
Not, as I have said before, that cracked encryption is always a bad thing but in this case I’m glad that the Swiss Army Knife retained that hard earned reputation for being a great tool that’s hard to get into.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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