Project Vault is a secure computer contained entirely on a micro SD sized device. Google’s ATAP said the micro SD format made sense because there’s already advanced security features on your phone, contained in the SIM card, which protects the things important to carriers. Vault is designed to be an equivalent, but designed to project a user’s important content.
Would be fun to play with on my Google Nexus 5.
Oh wait.
Micro SD car slot as well as security. It’s those big companies’ PR motto you are asked to believe. But you know it already, when they waves their hand at you, you can only see their middle finger raised high.
Live with it.
nothing else to say. that was a great comment, thom
Not really. SD card slots fail (far more frequently than you’d expect..), are nowhere near as fast as soldered flash, and there are all the issues with mounting the drive (Which mount point? What to do when a user takes out the card without unmounting it first? Etc.)
Put the MicroSD slot under the battery like the SIM slot usually is. If they manage to keep the phone running while pulling the battery, then it’s already “their own damn faultâ„¢”.
Sure, the user can’t hot-swap it, but they’ll at least have an analogue to carrying a pocketable USB hard drive with your aging laptop to store your growing media library that’s more practical for a phone than USB OTG.
Edited 2015-06-02 00:49 UTC
I’m really surprised Thom did not post a story about the new science-fiction-like user interfaces Google is working on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbWQbkl8_g&t=7m11s
It’s in the same presentation.
PS Now personally, seeing Mudge give a presentation on a new and exciting security device maybe makes me go even more ooh and ahh though.
Edited 2015-05-30 17:18 UTC
Thank you, this is really interesting.
instead of introducing additional pins, they should have gone with SDIO
Edited 2015-05-31 15:00 UTC
Project ara has really come pretty far. I wouldn’t be too surprised if its announced as a retail product in a couple Io’s from now. With Ara, you could add a sd slot, if that’s your desire.
You still have to trust the host device’s OS, graphics drivers, OS, etc to not leak whats on your screen while you type your “secret” messages.
In general I think its a good idea to try to isolate a piece of hardware that you can trust, but if you can only interface with it from a phone you don’t trust what is the point?