Physical destruction of the device is usually required by governments as the final EOL step. With encryption and removing just the key, you still have data present. It would be very difficult, but not impossible, to recover data assuming the target was high-value enough, and there's always a chance the key is stored somewhere else.
If there's a hole through the die there's no chance of recovering anything.
If it was important they could just throw a supercomputer at it for 5 minutes.
It would take 13,689 trillion trillion trillion trillion years with all the computers in the world working at once to crack basic AES 256.
https://scrambox.com/article/brute-force-aes/
But what about processing power increasing over time?
Earliest crack date is the year 2,276 assuming Moore's Law can continue to hold (which it hasn't). That's using all of the computers in the world in the future.
With current known techniques. The greatest tech to decrypt won't be given away to the public.
That’s what they want you to think.
I can guarantee there's patterns in the randomness that ai will molest, akin to indexing a hard drive. Never assume anything is safe.
That kind of processing power is what I mean. If it's high enough value, the money and time will be there.
That’s an awfully astute observation for a stupid bird….
Where physical destruction is required, you'd have to open the drive to verify destruction. At that point, it seems a hammer or grinder would be just as easy. A hole through the chip wouldn't prevent reading if someone was really dedicated.
It depends on how much of the die was destroyed. I'm going to assume that the charge will destroy the entire die, or the majority of it, which would incapacitate the drive.
This is designed for use in situations where you have to get rid of data quickly. Pressing a button and having an eraser size hole in the flash memory is going to destroy whatever was there.
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