[guardian-dev] IOIO board for Android

Alan alan at clueserver.org
Mon Apr 11 18:05:18 EDT 2011


On Mon, 2011-04-11 at 10:03 +0200, Moritz Bartl wrote:
> On 11.04.2011 06:14, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> > 
> > This looks like something we might want for our hardware bench, its a
> > hardware board that talks to the Android debugging.  One possible idea
> > is a highspeed phone dump before hitting the panic button, then you
> > could swallow the SD card and "retrieve" it later. ;)
> 
> I don't see the benefit over one of the numerous backup tools available?
> 
> I agree that something like a panic button that syncs the latest changes
> to a safe place (possibly online, or the SD card) and wipes the phone
> would be nice to have. The market is full with apps that remotely track
> and kill the phone, but 99% use proprietary servers - apart from
> GTalkSMS, which is quite nice, but not exactly what I am looking for.

Wipes are a bad idea. They take a long time and you lose data that you
may care about.

What you want is to be able to make the data recoverable to only the
right people.

Have a public key embedded in the kernel. (There are facilities to do in
kernel key storage.) When you hit the "panic button", encrypt the key
block on the encrypted partition with that key. and then
unmount/power-off.  

You still have the data (as long as the private key is in a safe
place). 

The data is recoverable. (To you, at least, as long as you don't lose
the phone. 

It is a hell of a lot quicker than wiping the media. 

It also deals with the "accidental brick" problem. (2 year old grabs the
phone and starts pushing all the wrong buttons.)






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