There have been some that doubted the day would ever come, however we’re pleased to report that the bold self-destructing USB drive that safety researcher [Walker] has been engaged on for the final 6+ months has lastly stopped working. Which on this case, is an efficient factor.

Readers could recall that the aim of the Ovrdrive undertaking was to create a standard-looking flash drive that didn’t simply disguise or erase its contents when accessed by an unauthorized person, however actively broken itself to attempt to forestall any forensic restoration of the information in query. To realize this, [Walker] constructed a voltage doubler circuit into the drive that produces 10 volts from the nominal 5 VDC coming from the USB port. On the command of an onboard microcontroller, that 10 V is related to the circuit’s 3.3 V rail to set off the fireworks.

Early makes an attempt solely corrupted a few of the information, so [Walker] added some extra capacitance to the circuit to construct up extra of a cost. With the revised circuit the USB controller IC visibly popped, however even after it was changed, the NAND flash was nonetheless unresponsive. Sounds fairly useless to us.

Sadly, there’s nonetheless not less than one difficulty that’s holding again the design. As we talked about beforehand, [Walker] was having hassle getting the pc to really acknowledge his homebrew drive had any free house out there. It seems that the SM3257EN USB controller IC he’s utilizing must be initialized by some poorly documented Home windows XP software program, which could not be such a giant deal if the aim was simply to construct one in all them, however may clearly be a hindrance when going into manufacturing.

He hopes additional reverse engineering will enable him to find out which instructions the XP software program is giving to the IC in order that he can duplicate them in a much less historic setting. Appears like a job for Wireshark to us — hopefully he ought to be capable to seize the instructions being despatched to the {hardware} and replay them.

Whereas we will perceive some readers could have lingering doubts concerning the drive’s spit-detection authentication system, it’s clear [Walker] has made some unimaginable progress right here. This undertaking demonstrates that not solely can a person spin up their very own bought state storage, however that ought to they ever must, they will additionally destroy it immediately.