I'm not sure that it's as tough as your analogy makes out. I'd say something like "Once the thief notices the safe door is open they can probably take your secr

I'm not sure that it's as tough as your analogy makes out. I'd say something like "Once the thief notices the safe door is open they can probably take your secrets out of it" :) However, I agree that there are probably some cases where the secrets are in memory rather than on the disk where this approach would be very useful. The typical case though is reboot to alternative media or single user mode.