Chip and ackka made a number of good points, notably regarding physical security. The opportunities for accessing data become fewer and fewer when a system can't be physically accessed.
Also, as Chip noted, "Security Through Obscurity" can be a good option, especially when combined with encryption. I made use of this approach while writing a viewer/editor for my company's registered documents. The files can't be copied or edited without authorization because they are embedded in graphic images, the location of which can't be learned without disassembling the viewer. A user can't even copy and paste the document into another editor or save it to the graphic clipboard with the PrintScreen key.
The only intention here was to prevent employees from making copies of the docs, altering them and contaminating the system with unauthorized versions. A fair solution for non-proprietary, non-mission-critical data but obviously a weak solution for ianosborne's problem. As Chip pointed out, you can make a hard drive appear to contain nothing of importance but, if a determined individual is certain it contains something he wants, it's practically impossible to prevent him from finding it.
The problem becomes harder to solve when you are dealing with a salesman who turns to industrial espionage (as was suggested). Forseeing the dirty tricks of a "trusted" employee could be tough but there are many ways to protect your data:
One would consist of a "doomsday switch" (this might work in a few instances). Obtain some "file-shredder" software and find a way to activate it under certain circumstances... say, an amount of time has elapsed without administrative intervention or there have been three successive attempts to guess a password. Shred the hard drive.
Another would involve a bit of hardware. I'm not sure if you can buy this yet but logic suggests that if there is a need, the solution will be for sale somewhere. A laptop case might be rigged with a simple switch and a large capacitor. Any attempt to open the case to remove the hard drive could cause a few thousand volts to fry the IDE circuits and much of the magnetic media. The data might still be recoverable (with an electon microscope) but the recovery would be much more difficult.
Ahhh... you
did say we were talking about Mission Impossible here, didn't you?
Alt255@Vorpalcom.Intranets.com
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