GoKawiilThis article was written by a human, for humans.
Many places don’t respect privacy laws, in certain situations you may be forced to unencrypt your media, or worse, assumed to be guilty. A Veracrypt hidden volume is useful in the former situation, but not the latter.
This is why I made Phantomdrive.
Phantomdrive is a completely open source USB drive that appears as an 8 GB drive when first plugged in. There’s no way for the OS to detect the remainder of the disk. If the user edits a plaintext file on the disk with the contents password:PUTYOURPASSWORDHERE , it unmounts itself and remounts the second hidden section and AES-256 encrypts/decrypts in place.
With Phantomdrive, hopefully you’ll slip past authoritarian government representatives, corrupt police, and anyone else that doesn’t respect basic encryption rights.
The Design
Everything is completely open source: the firmware, hardware and mechanical engineering. The tools I used to design the device are also open source. Lets get into the design!
For this project I used an interesting little chip called the CH569. It’s from the same company who make the USB to Serial chip (CH340) found on virtually every knockoff Arduino.
For this project I’m making use of the USB3, SD/eMMC and the AES block. The SM4 encryption block you can see above is apparently standardised for commercial cryptography in China - Wikipedia.
Due to AI demand the cost of eMMC memory is unusually high, so I chose to go with an SD card for memory. Someone will find your SD card if they tear it apart, but of course everything is encrypted. I used epoxy to glue the case together, meaning an attacker must destroy the device if they wish to get inside. If this doesn’t fit your requirements, I suggest you look elsewhere 😊
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