Evidence Preserving Hard Disk Unlocking System

Luna Innovations will design and develop a hard disk unlocking system that is easily usable by forensic technicians while preserving evidentiary integrity. Our solution will be robust even against anticipated future drive features and drives modified by criminals to have certain anti-tamper properties. This is important as it is nearly certain that manufacturers or criminals will develop such countermeasures to systems not designed with such foresight. Examples of related technology include modern flash drives which employ encryption, authentication, and anti-tamper technologies, like the IronKey (www.ironkey.com), Seagate Full Disk Encryption, and others. We will design our system to be user friendly: specifically, it will illustrate exactly what must be done with a given drive. Law enforcement personnel will access and copy password-protected hard disk drives quickly and with confidence in maintaining evidence integrity for later prosecution. We envision an expanded market of state and local investigatory organs which will benefit communities by placing the resource close to more searches in order to obtain timely clues to related criminal efforts. Indeed, such functionality will be needed in the future as more sophisticated criminals use computers to organize their enterprises.