10 ms·

All we really need is a real passcode, and then a second special passcode that wipes the phone instantly if typed. so, my normal code might be 123456, but if s

by abakker 11y ago

All we really need is a real passcode, and then a second special passcode that wipes the phone instantly if typed. so, my normal code might be 123456, but if someone asks what my code is and I say 345678, then the phone does a data wipe that isn't obvious from the outside, and just deletes all credentials, cookies, history, documents, etc. Is this workable?

monochromatic 11y ago
And then they get you for destruction of evidence?
- roosterjm2k2 11y ago
  Wouldn't they have to prove that there was evidence pertaining specifically to the current case to get you for destroying evidence?
  - openasocket 11y ago
    They could almost certainly get you for interfering with an investigation, though.
  - knodi123 11y ago
    It must be the case that evidence can be either damning or exculpatory, and either way you're not allowed to destroy it. Otherwise destroying evidence would be incentivized, because once they can actually prove that the damning evidence was present before you destroyed it.... that proof is as good as having the evidence in the first place. A judge isn't a robot. If you say "I hit an emergency button to reformat my hard drives as the cops were breaking down the door, because I was preparing to sell those drives on ebay and needed to clean them up", the judge is not obligated to respond "Shoot, I can't prove otherwise, you're free to go."
    - wang_li 11y ago
      "What the hell did you people do to my computer? Where's all my shit? I'm going to sue you assholes!!!"
      - knodi123 11y ago
        That's probably a decently clever approach. Thank goodness most criminals aren't clever. Or at least, so we assume based on the percentage of them who get caught.... Oh dear.
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    Exactly. Unless the device has untamperable auditing running behind the scenes that shows stuff was deleted, there's virtually no way for the police to know.
    - wpietri 11y ago
      Probably not. Erasing leaves marks. The only marketable purpose for an instant erasure system like that is protection of information (personal or commercial). To build that, you'd make something that zeros all the files and deletes them, deletes and overwrites all the contacts, and such. But the structures left after that don't look like a brand new device. They look like you had a bunch of things and then erased them. Cops won't know what you erased, but they'll know you handed them a phone that was recently erased. Now maybe somebody will build an app tuned for obstruction of justice, so it tries to make the phone look brand new. And maybe you'll be very lucky and they'll get it working perfectly on your specific phone. But then you have to explain how you have a brand new phone that was actually purchased a year ago. And how it has no record of any of the calls that your phone carrier will have records of. The obvious conclusion is that you wiped it sometime after your last call and with special software that only appeals to people planning on hindering an investigation. Is that enough to convict you for obstruction of justice? I have no idea; it probably depends on how much a prosecutor cares. But is it enough to convince cops you are vigorously hiding something? You bet.
      - realusername 11y ago
        It depends, is there any legal requirement that the device actually has to record a call log normally ?
        wpietri 11y ago
        Not sure how that matters. Is there any legal requirement to keep your receipts? No, but if you suddenly throw them out because you think the police might find them useful, that's still obstruction of justice.
      - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    That's not hard. At the time of arrest, suspect was observed using Facebook. Here are the correlating logs from Facebook. After unlocking suspect's device using provided code, no Facebook login credentials were present, thus proving that the suspect used the erase code and not the usual code.
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      My defendant favors using private browsing mode for a number of reasons including preventing friends from being able to access his personal accounts and to lower the risk of tracking and accidentally acquiring viruses.
      - tedunangst 11y ago
        Here are the Facebook logs from the past two weeks all using the same session token, demonstrating that your client is lying. And now when you try to explain that ok, maybe some information was deleted but that's only because it was embarrassing, and it wasn't evidence of any crime whatsoever, you'll have zero credibility...
  - zmb_ 11y ago
    Not for "anticipatory obstruction of justice". It doesn't matter whether what you destroyed is important to a case or not. There does not even need to be a case at all. You can still be charged if you deleted something, and maximum penalty is imprisonment for 20 years. Hanni Fakhoury, EFF attorney, gave a talk about this at ShmooCon 2012[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzssKvRwrzQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzssKvRwrzQ
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      Doesn't this mean that even clearing your browsing cache is a crime? I deleted temp files recently because they were taking up a bunch of space. I did it to free up space but there could've been evidence there for some investigation (maybe some virus on my machine left evidence of who wrote the virus in temp files that would've allowed the feds to track down the creator). This seems like one of those laws that sounds good at first but makes a lot of normal behavior illegal, thus allowing the legal system to be able to pick and choose who gets punished.
      - secabeen 11y ago
        The burden is on the prosecution to prove that "The accused acted at least “in relation to” or “in contemplation’” of such issue or matter." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstruction_of_justice#Obstruction_trends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstruction_of_justice#Obstruc...
- grecy 11y ago
  interestingly, I didn't destroy any evidence. I just verbally said something and they took action which destroyed the evidence. It was their action that destroyed it, not my words.
  - geofft 11y ago
    Clever! A judge will surely look favorably on your ingenuity in making the technical facts of your actions not a violation of a pedantic reading of the law, and disregard the intent of your actions. Similarly, did you know you can legally murder anyone by poisoning their food? You didn't make them eat the poison, they voluntarily ate the food. It gets ruled a suicide. For more on this and other little-known facts about the law, please subscribe to my YouTube Guide to Being a Sovereign Citizen, only $199/month.
ctdonath 11y ago
Not a new idea. There has long been a meme going around that if you enter your ATM PIN backwards, it will let you access your bank account but silently calls the police to your location (AFAIK it's just an urban myth). False passwords have a much older history than that. Investigators are going to take a very dim view of such events, and probably didn't get to the point of demanding access without having documented sensible reason to believe the evidence is there - and may very well have actionable proof that you destroyed evidence, which will not turn out in your favor.
- colanderman 11y ago
  If that weren't an urban myth it must suck to be one of those 1% of suckers with palindromic PINs.
  - MacsHeadroom 11y ago
    12% of suckers
- ClintEhrlich 11y ago
  The ATM feature you mentioned is not totally apocryphal. It's a software called SafetyPIN, which has apparently been patented but not commercially adopted.
  - dalke 11y ago
    Cool! I had no idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATM_SafetyPIN_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATM_SafetyPIN_software .
    - MichaelGG 11y ago
      FFS what a terrible patent[1]. It really is basically "hey what if people put their PIN in backwards; we could call the cops" written out to many pages long. How any patent examiner could read this and think "yes this is novel and obviously required effort worth protecting" is beyond me. 1: https://www.google.com/patents/US5731575 https://www.google.com/patents/US5731575
mindslight 11y ago
You're assuming your device is still in control, and hasn't been imaged. This isn't the way a proper forensic process actually works. More important to the issue at hand, I believe that in at least one case the reason for the passcode/phrase being "testimony" isn't so much that you're revealing what's in the locked container, but that you're demonstrating that you have access to/control over its contents. So entering your erasecode would undermine this point. A courier could not know a passphrase yet be deputized to erase the contents, but that is going to be an uphill argument. What we really want is a proper layered steganographic filesystem, with an arbitrary number of unlockable levels. But we need an OS and apps that play nicely with that as well.
aianus 11y ago
Or alternatively, you can have multiple layers of encryption a la Truecrypt Hidden Volumes (http://www.howtogeek.com/109210/the-htg-guide-to-hiding-your-data-in-a-truecrypt-hidden-volume/ http://www.howtogeek.com/109210/the-htg-guide-to-hiding-your...) The first layer contains something embarrassing but legal like gay porn, and the second layer contains the stuff you really want to hide. You just unlock the first layer and act really embarrassed if forced and never acknowledge the existence of the second layer.
- retbull 11y ago
  Police do know about this and can (hypothetically) check to see if there is another encrypted volume inside. Also didn't Truecrypt shut down because they had some huge security vulnerability.
  - aianus 11y ago
    How can they check? It's certainly possible that Truecrypt has some implementation issues, but I can't see why it's not theoretically possible to do this well.
    - function_seven 11y ago
      Here's some good reading. Looks like they can't irrefutably establish a hidden volume's presence, but there are lots of clues nonetheless. http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/9058/is-it-possible-to-infer-that-a-hidden-truecrypt-partition-is-likely-to-be-presen http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/9058/is-it-possi...
      - aianus 11y ago
        Well, driving around in a $300k car that you can't explain purchasing is a HUGE clue that you're a drug dealer but it's not enough on its own to charge you with anything. You won't get thrown in jail until you cough up the location of the stash house based on the car alone. What do the proponents of these encryption laws expect the penalties to be for 'suspicion of possession of encrypted material'? I don't see any way to create effective deterrents here without making it easy to persecute anyone for any reason. Imagine cops planting USB keys with random bits on minorities they don't like, etc. Edit: or worse, 15-year-olds planting USB keys with random bits on teachers they don't like and claiming it's CP and then watching them get fired and go to prison for 'refusal to decrypt' shudder
Shivetya 11y ago
I really don't see why not. My home security system has a code similar, disables the alarm but sends a signal to send police now without calling. I could even see it with touch sensors, that being teaching it that the middle finger wipes the puppy. With regards to the court decision, I am not sure it will stand in this context. The phones belong to the employer and not the employees. So how as an employer do you retain some access over your provided phones? I can see both sides here. To be honest as a company I don't think its worth the legal ramifications to have power over the content of the phone as it just opens a can of worms Where I work we are required to pass code our phones if we access the corporate internet or exchange servers but we are not required to divulge our phone contents, passcode, nor place software on the phone giving the company any such ability.
- stillsut 11y ago
  Or after 3 unsuccessful tries, the system wipes itself. Try: macworld, oops...macw0rld, oops... macwor1d! There's no law against incompetence, true?
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    A: They'll probably try to clone the memory. B: If a judge thought you were doing this intentionally, they'd hit you with contempt (or other things).
logn 11y ago
A more fun solution would be to count the time it takes to enter the password. If it's too slow, then wipe the data. Or more advanced, count the tempo, beat and duration of key presses. "Your honor, my password is 1234121234... but be sure to type the 4's as dotted eighth notes, take a rest after the 2's, and moderato!"
- spacemanmatt 11y ago
  port-knocking to a funky beat
- bri3d 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_dynamics#Use_as_Biometric_Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_dynamics#Use_as_Biom...
tsotha 11y ago
Not really, no, because it turns out cops aren't actually stupid. When they arrest you and take your phone (or anything electronic, really) the first thing they do is clone the memory. You might succeed in wiping out a copy by giving them the alternate password, but that's just going to add to your charge list. There was a case a few years back (discussed on HN) where a gang had software installed on everyone's phone that caused a remote wipe when activated. The cops did a big raid, and even though they took everyone's phone someone they hadn't caught yet was able to wipe them. The cops changed their SOP so that when they get ahold of your phone the first thing they do is yank the battery.
- nadams 11y ago
  > When they arrest you and take your phone (or anything electronic, really) the first thing they do is clone the memory Depends on the situation. If it's a raid due to software piracy - then probably. If they pulled you over for speeding and arresting you - they probably won't or even know what to look for. And I really can't think of a way to clone a device like an Android device without unlocking it. ADB now a days requires your explicit permission from a prompt. And if you are like "oh they have ways" I would be very interested in that because that sounds like whatever they are doing are using an exploit or some sort of back door.
  - tsotha 11y ago
    >And I really can't think of a way to clone a device like an Android device without unlocking it. ADB now a days requires your explicit permission from a prompt. And if you are like "oh they have ways" I would be very interested in that because that sounds like whatever they are doing are using an exploit or some sort of back door. No, they don't need to use any kind of exploit. They have hardware that allows them to clone the the device's memory. I doubt it has to be on at all. There's no way to secure a device if the attacker has physical access. The best you can do is secure the data with encryption.
  - cvwright 11y ago
    Behold the Samsung Anyway Jig: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1629359 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1629359 The link is a few years old. No idea if there is a current version that works on modern phones, but it seems reasonable to assume there would be.
nadams 11y ago
> Is this workable? I know in the Windows Mobile/Blackberry days if you typed in the incorrect password so many times it would reset the device. However, with many Android devices now a days have the ability to have a "guest mode" - that is activated using a different unlock code. This mode can be limited to not even be able to make/receive calls. Arguably most people won't know what this "mode" is and if they are in it.
paulsutter 11y ago
If you share the information-destroying code, then you're the one who caused the destruction of evidence after an investigation is underway. Which you don't want. Perhaps some software that clears the phone when someone tries to break into the phone / copy data? A prudent security precaution for all sorts of reasons.

by abakker 11y ago

monochromatic 11y ago

And then they get you for destruction of evidence?

roosterjm2k2 11y ago
Wouldn't they have to prove that there was evidence pertaining specifically to the current case to get you for destroying evidence?
- openasocket 11y ago
  They could almost certainly get you for interfering with an investigation, though.
- knodi123 11y ago
  It must be the case that evidence can be either damning or exculpatory, and either way you're not allowed to destroy it. Otherwise destroying evidence would be incentivized, because once they can actually prove that the damning evidence was present before you destroyed it.... that proof is as good as having the evidence in the first place. A judge isn't a robot. If you say "I hit an emergency button to reformat my hard drives as the cops were breaking down the door, because I was preparing to sell those drives on ebay and needed to clean them up", the judge is not obligated to respond "Shoot, I can't prove otherwise, you're free to go."
  - wang_li 11y ago
    "What the hell did you people do to my computer? Where's all my shit? I'm going to sue you assholes!!!"
    - knodi123 11y ago
      That's probably a decently clever approach. Thank goodness most criminals aren't clever. Or at least, so we assume based on the percentage of them who get caught.... Oh dear.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  Exactly. Unless the device has untamperable auditing running behind the scenes that shows stuff was deleted, there's virtually no way for the police to know.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    Probably not. Erasing leaves marks. The only marketable purpose for an instant erasure system like that is protection of information (personal or commercial). To build that, you'd make something that zeros all the files and deletes them, deletes and overwrites all the contacts, and such. But the structures left after that don't look like a brand new device. They look like you had a bunch of things and then erased them. Cops won't know what you erased, but they'll know you handed them a phone that was recently erased. Now maybe somebody will build an app tuned for obstruction of justice, so it tries to make the phone look brand new. And maybe you'll be very lucky and they'll get it working perfectly on your specific phone. But then you have to explain how you have a brand new phone that was actually purchased a year ago. And how it has no record of any of the calls that your phone carrier will have records of. The obvious conclusion is that you wiped it sometime after your last call and with special software that only appeals to people planning on hindering an investigation. Is that enough to convict you for obstruction of justice? I have no idea; it probably depends on how much a prosecutor cares. But is it enough to convince cops you are vigorously hiding something? You bet.
    - realusername 11y ago
      It depends, is there any legal requirement that the device actually has to record a call log normally ?
      - wpietri 11y ago
        Not sure how that matters. Is there any legal requirement to keep your receipts? No, but if you suddenly throw them out because you think the police might find them useful, that's still obstruction of justice.
    - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
- tedunangst 11y ago
  That's not hard. At the time of arrest, suspect was observed using Facebook. Here are the correlating logs from Facebook. After unlocking suspect's device using provided code, no Facebook login credentials were present, thus proving that the suspect used the erase code and not the usual code.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    My defendant favors using private browsing mode for a number of reasons including preventing friends from being able to access his personal accounts and to lower the risk of tracking and accidentally acquiring viruses.
    - tedunangst 11y ago
      Here are the Facebook logs from the past two weeks all using the same session token, demonstrating that your client is lying. And now when you try to explain that ok, maybe some information was deleted but that's only because it was embarrassing, and it wasn't evidence of any crime whatsoever, you'll have zero credibility...
- zmb_ 11y ago
  Not for "anticipatory obstruction of justice". It doesn't matter whether what you destroyed is important to a case or not. There does not even need to be a case at all. You can still be charged if you deleted something, and maximum penalty is imprisonment for 20 years. Hanni Fakhoury, EFF attorney, gave a talk about this at ShmooCon 2012[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzssKvRwrzQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzssKvRwrzQ
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    Doesn't this mean that even clearing your browsing cache is a crime? I deleted temp files recently because they were taking up a bunch of space. I did it to free up space but there could've been evidence there for some investigation (maybe some virus on my machine left evidence of who wrote the virus in temp files that would've allowed the feds to track down the creator). This seems like one of those laws that sounds good at first but makes a lot of normal behavior illegal, thus allowing the legal system to be able to pick and choose who gets punished.
    - secabeen 11y ago
      The burden is on the prosecution to prove that "The accused acted at least “in relation to” or “in contemplation’” of such issue or matter." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstruction_of_justice#Obstruction_trends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstruction_of_justice#Obstruc...
grecy 11y ago
interestingly, I didn't destroy any evidence. I just verbally said something and they took action which destroyed the evidence. It was their action that destroyed it, not my words.
- geofft 11y ago
  Clever! A judge will surely look favorably on your ingenuity in making the technical facts of your actions not a violation of a pedantic reading of the law, and disregard the intent of your actions. Similarly, did you know you can legally murder anyone by poisoning their food? You didn't make them eat the poison, they voluntarily ate the food. It gets ruled a suicide. For more on this and other little-known facts about the law, please subscribe to my YouTube Guide to Being a Sovereign Citizen, only $199/month.

ctdonath 11y ago

Not a new idea. There has long been a meme going around that if you enter your ATM PIN backwards, it will let you access your bank account but silently calls the police to your location (AFAIK it's just an urban myth). False passwords have a much older history than that. Investigators are going to take a very dim view of such events, and probably didn't get to the point of demanding access without having documented sensible reason to believe the evidence is there - and may very well have actionable proof that you destroyed evidence, which will not turn out in your favor.

colanderman 11y ago
If that weren't an urban myth it must suck to be one of those 1% of suckers with palindromic PINs.
- MacsHeadroom 11y ago
  12% of suckers
ClintEhrlich 11y ago
The ATM feature you mentioned is not totally apocryphal. It's a software called SafetyPIN, which has apparently been patented but not commercially adopted.
- dalke 11y ago
  Cool! I had no idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATM_SafetyPIN_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATM_SafetyPIN_software .
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    FFS what a terrible patent[1]. It really is basically "hey what if people put their PIN in backwards; we could call the cops" written out to many pages long. How any patent examiner could read this and think "yes this is novel and obviously required effort worth protecting" is beyond me. 1: https://www.google.com/patents/US5731575 https://www.google.com/patents/US5731575

mindslight 11y ago

You're assuming your device is still in control, and hasn't been imaged. This isn't the way a proper forensic process actually works. More important to the issue at hand, I believe that in at least one case the reason for the passcode/phrase being "testimony" isn't so much that you're revealing what's in the locked container, but that you're demonstrating that you have access to/control over its contents. So entering your erasecode would undermine this point. A courier could not know a passphrase yet be deputized to erase the contents, but that is going to be an uphill argument. What we really want is a proper layered steganographic filesystem, with an arbitrary number of unlockable levels. But we need an OS and apps that play nicely with that as well.

aianus 11y ago

Or alternatively, you can have multiple layers of encryption a la Truecrypt Hidden Volumes (http://www.howtogeek.com/109210/the-htg-guide-to-hiding-your-data-in-a-truecrypt-hidden-volume/ http://www.howtogeek.com/109210/the-htg-guide-to-hiding-your...) The first layer contains something embarrassing but legal like gay porn, and the second layer contains the stuff you really want to hide. You just unlock the first layer and act really embarrassed if forced and never acknowledge the existence of the second layer.

retbull 11y ago
Police do know about this and can (hypothetically) check to see if there is another encrypted volume inside. Also didn't Truecrypt shut down because they had some huge security vulnerability.
- aianus 11y ago
  How can they check? It's certainly possible that Truecrypt has some implementation issues, but I can't see why it's not theoretically possible to do this well.
  - function_seven 11y ago
    Here's some good reading. Looks like they can't irrefutably establish a hidden volume's presence, but there are lots of clues nonetheless. http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/9058/is-it-possible-to-infer-that-a-hidden-truecrypt-partition-is-likely-to-be-presen http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/9058/is-it-possi...
    - aianus 11y ago
      Well, driving around in a $300k car that you can't explain purchasing is a HUGE clue that you're a drug dealer but it's not enough on its own to charge you with anything. You won't get thrown in jail until you cough up the location of the stash house based on the car alone. What do the proponents of these encryption laws expect the penalties to be for 'suspicion of possession of encrypted material'? I don't see any way to create effective deterrents here without making it easy to persecute anyone for any reason. Imagine cops planting USB keys with random bits on minorities they don't like, etc. Edit: or worse, 15-year-olds planting USB keys with random bits on teachers they don't like and claiming it's CP and then watching them get fired and go to prison for 'refusal to decrypt' shudder

Shivetya 11y ago

I really don't see why not. My home security system has a code similar, disables the alarm but sends a signal to send police now without calling. I could even see it with touch sensors, that being teaching it that the middle finger wipes the puppy. With regards to the court decision, I am not sure it will stand in this context. The phones belong to the employer and not the employees. So how as an employer do you retain some access over your provided phones? I can see both sides here. To be honest as a company I don't think its worth the legal ramifications to have power over the content of the phone as it just opens a can of worms Where I work we are required to pass code our phones if we access the corporate internet or exchange servers but we are not required to divulge our phone contents, passcode, nor place software on the phone giving the company any such ability.

stillsut 11y ago
Or after 3 unsuccessful tries, the system wipes itself. Try: macworld, oops...macw0rld, oops... macwor1d! There's no law against incompetence, true?
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  A: They'll probably try to clone the memory. B: If a judge thought you were doing this intentionally, they'd hit you with contempt (or other things).

logn 11y ago

A more fun solution would be to count the time it takes to enter the password. If it's too slow, then wipe the data. Or more advanced, count the tempo, beat and duration of key presses. "Your honor, my password is 1234121234... but be sure to type the 4's as dotted eighth notes, take a rest after the 2's, and moderato!"

spacemanmatt 11y ago
port-knocking to a funky beat
bri3d 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_dynamics#Use_as_Biometric_Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_dynamics#Use_as_Biom...

tsotha 11y ago

Not really, no, because it turns out cops aren't actually stupid. When they arrest you and take your phone (or anything electronic, really) the first thing they do is clone the memory. You might succeed in wiping out a copy by giving them the alternate password, but that's just going to add to your charge list. There was a case a few years back (discussed on HN) where a gang had software installed on everyone's phone that caused a remote wipe when activated. The cops did a big raid, and even though they took everyone's phone someone they hadn't caught yet was able to wipe them. The cops changed their SOP so that when they get ahold of your phone the first thing they do is yank the battery.

nadams 11y ago
> When they arrest you and take your phone (or anything electronic, really) the first thing they do is clone the memory Depends on the situation. If it's a raid due to software piracy - then probably. If they pulled you over for speeding and arresting you - they probably won't or even know what to look for. And I really can't think of a way to clone a device like an Android device without unlocking it. ADB now a days requires your explicit permission from a prompt. And if you are like "oh they have ways" I would be very interested in that because that sounds like whatever they are doing are using an exploit or some sort of back door.
- tsotha 11y ago
  >And I really can't think of a way to clone a device like an Android device without unlocking it. ADB now a days requires your explicit permission from a prompt. And if you are like "oh they have ways" I would be very interested in that because that sounds like whatever they are doing are using an exploit or some sort of back door. No, they don't need to use any kind of exploit. They have hardware that allows them to clone the the device's memory. I doubt it has to be on at all. There's no way to secure a device if the attacker has physical access. The best you can do is secure the data with encryption.
- cvwright 11y ago
  Behold the Samsung Anyway Jig: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1629359 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1629359 The link is a few years old. No idea if there is a current version that works on modern phones, but it seems reasonable to assume there would be.

nadams 11y ago

> Is this workable? I know in the Windows Mobile/Blackberry days if you typed in the incorrect password so many times it would reset the device. However, with many Android devices now a days have the ability to have a "guest mode" - that is activated using a different unlock code. This mode can be limited to not even be able to make/receive calls. Arguably most people won't know what this "mode" is and if they are in it.

paulsutter 11y ago

If you share the information-destroying code, then you're the one who caused the destruction of evidence after an investigation is underway. Which you don't want. Perhaps some software that clears the phone when someone tries to break into the phone / copy data? A prudent security precaution for all sorts of reasons.