Glitter Nail Polish An Excellent Solution To Prevent Physical Tampering And Security Breach!

Physical tampering of hardware is a common issue among users who are concerned with security of their devices. People who travel across will have faced similar issues and most of the time the tampering go undetected. But the security experts have come up with an ingenious solution, although it may sound low tech!

The solution suggested at Chaos Communication Congress in Germany. Usually travelers rely on tamper proof seals or tamper resistant gums on screws to prevent the misuse. But as per experts the seals can be opened in minutes and replaced by any person with minimal training. This solution thus is disregarded. The glitter nail polish comes in to act during this procedure, the presentation suggested that if we paint the screws and ports using glitter nail polish, it creates a unique pattern which is quite effective in tamper detection!

How does it work?

The procedure will be to paint your screws, ports and similar vulnerable areas with glitter nail polish and take a picture of the painted area and then take a picture of the locations post your travel. Usually human eye will be easily deceived by the patterns but to detect changes there is a software which can compare the two photographs and detect as tiny change as a glitter missing or a screw position changed or similar.

The technology used to compare the photographs is a small version of what the astronomers use to detect the changes in sky, known as blink comparison.

“This makes it non-skippable by users,” said Michaud, CEO of Rift Recon. “If the user doesn’t do the check, it doesn’t work.”

The pair said they will within a few months release an inexpensive tool that will support this two-step verification system. Such machine-assisted verification was necessary to help travelers overcome their own mistakes, they argued.

“Users are lazy,” Michaud said. “It’s really unlikely that we’re going to build a system based on users making the correct security decisions all the time.” - from Wired.com

Source: Wired.com Image: Wikimedia.org

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- Unknown Updated at: Thursday, January 02, 2014