The NTSB's original report has more detail on how the SD Card was encrypted and how the NTSB managed to decrypt it: https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=18741602&Fi...
Does not leave SubC in a particularly flattering light...
Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site
41–50 of 221 posts
Re: Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you do screen replacement? That is a common repair since people drop their phones and currently you can get your phone repaired by some teenager in a booth at the mall. If you fill the phone with epoxy, how are you detaching the screen, and getting a new ribbon cable through the epoxy?
use pogo pins or a board to board connector
Which means air space that can get crushed. Either the phone is solid or it isn't.
Re: Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site
#43Since not everyone reads articles:
> Somewhat disappointingly, the images and videos shared in the report were taken in the vicinity of the ROV shop at the Marine Institute, also in Newfoundland. The location was the logistical base for Titanic dive missions. No deep-sea shenanigans around the Titanic wreck were revealed.
Re: Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes because external storage is much larger, and theres nothing more annoying than being in the middle of doing some science with 30 other bits of complex equipment, and then the camera stops working with storage full errors and youre 7000m underwater in a cramped sub trying to navigate a camera UI to find the setting. Configure your systems so they are in the configuration that is less likely to cause random disrupt…
Which makes me wonder why they bother with the SD card at all. What was it meant to be storing? If it is not intended to be the real storage area, why not just have it in a loop, constantly over-writing the oldest material?
They probably used it for testing only, hence why it had irrelevant footage.
They might have forgot to remove or just didn't care.
Re: Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also amazes me that people are using the internet w/o an adblocker in the year 2025
i was also in shock, then someone reminded me there are iphone users. the horror. paying thousands of dollars just to be forbidden to block ads.
?
There are countless free and paid options on iOS too
Firefox Focus, Brave
AdGuard Pro, $9.99 once and you can use any blocklist you want (you can just copypaste from uBlock Origin if you wish) and it works system-wide with Safari
etc
Re: Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site
#46It continues to amaze me how indestructible SDCards are.
It's a solid piece of silicon encased in epoxy, so there's nothing really to get crushed. Contrast this to something like a cellphone that's made of hundreds of separate parts and has void space that will get crushed.
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Re: Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
A conformal coating isn't "filled with epoxy", which is the concern I was answering.
There is very little empty space in a phone, so conformal coating is practically the same as filling it. Anyway, I wasn't disagreeing, just reasoning a bit further.
The point of filling it is to remove the compressible empty space so that large pressure gradients won’t crush it.
Re: Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site
#48I see a lot of discussion in this thread stemming from some confusion+not reading the actual report[0].
Some key points:
1. The Camera+Card was encased in a separate enclosure made of titanium+sapphire, and did not seem to be exposed to extreme pressures.
2. The encryption was done via a variant of LUKS/dm-crypt, with the key stored on the NVRAM of a chip (Edited; not in TrustZone).
3. The recovery was done by transplanting the original chip onto a new working board. No manufacturer backdoors or other hidden mechanisms were used.
4. Interestingly, the camera vendor didn't seem to realize there was any encryption at all.
[0] https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=18741602&Fi...
Re: Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site
#49also basically if enough companies agrees on helping the cause your crypto secrets are quite more likely to be exposed...
Isnt the weakness here that there was nothing encrypting the actual key? On a laptop luks key stored in a tpm would usually be encrypted using your passphrase
The NTSB report noted that if the TrustZone secure enclave system was being used, then yeah this data would be toast.
But it speaks more to Oceangstrs negligence that this situation even existed: why wasn't any potential encryption keys escrowed ashore to ensure they could be recovered later? This shouldn't have even been an issue.
Re: Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a solid piece of silicon encased in epoxy, so there's nothing really to get crushed. Contrast this to something like a cellphone that's made of hundreds of separate parts and has void space that will get crushed.
Why isn't a cellphone filled with epoxy?
The GoPro Session actually took this tack to achieve waterproofness without a secondary case.