14 DAY TRIAL // Self-destructing gadgets seem like something you would see in a Bond movie, but it seems that researchers from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia have managed to build a prototype of such a device.
The team of researchers created a self-destructing gadget that can completely destroy a smartphone in just ten seconds. It can also be programmed to automatically trigger itself under certain conditions. The whole mechanism allows the channeling of power from the device’s battery into electrodes that rapidly heat, according to BGR.
The transfer of power triggers the release of a special polymer that quickly expands and crushes the processor inside the smartphone. Then, the polymer expands even more and causes tension in the thin silicon, which then crumples and breaks. Temperatures can reach up to 80 degrees Celsius and the polymer layer can expand to around seven times its original volume.
Researchers even built an app to trigger the device to self-destruct
The smartphone itself doesn’t necessarily need to be in the owner’s possession in order to initiate the self-destruct process. Researchers have found that the mechanism can be triggered with a GPS sensor, in order to make the phone or any other device self-destroy when it passes a specific distance from the anchor point.
Researchers also built a smartphone app to communicate with a specific device and trigger the procedure using just a password. The technology is currently under testing and the team of researchers managed to completely destroy the chip, as well as the storage drives and other components on the phone, thus effectively wiping all data.
“The first customers would be the ones who need data protection: Intelligence communities, corporations, banks, hedge funds, social security administrations, collectors who handle massive data,” says Muhammad Mustafa Hussain, an electrical engineer at KAUST.
Truth be told, if you wanted to completely destroy a phone, you would tamper with the relatively unstable lithium-ion battery. We’ve seen many cases in which smartphones caught fire and were completely destroyed after the poorly designed battery overheated.