Remote Lock-and-Wipe in Action

For teams out in the field — in delivery and shipping, engineering, or remote manufacturing — a lost laptop or tablet isn’t just lost property. It’s a data risk. Ordinary “remote wipe” tools work by deleting files one by one, and that process can be interrupted, dodged, or only partly finished, leaving some data recoverable.

At Infinary, we use remote lock-and-wipe to lock or erase a lost device from afar. Instead of deleting files one at a time, we destroy the keys that unlock the drive. Without the keys, the whole drive becomes unreadable at once.

Every Device Managed From Day One

This depends on locking devices down at the deepest level, built into the device itself. Every field device — iPhones and iPads through Apple Business Manager, or Android devices through Zero-Touch Enrollment — is registered the moment it leaves the factory. That forces the device to load our management software before anyone can even finish the setup screen.

The upshot: no company device is ever running outside our control, not even for a minute.

Destroying the Keys, Not the Files

When a device is reported lost, or we detect that a login has been stolen, remote lock-and-wipe kicks in automatically. Rather than send a slow “wipe everything” command, we destroy the recovery keys — FileVault on Mac, BitLocker on Windows — and immediately swap out the keys built into the device that unlock its data.

Once the keys are gone, the data on the drive can’t be recovered, even by experts who physically remove the memory chips and read them directly.

Locking Down in Under a Second

Our goal is to leave no window of exposure at all. We use Google Cloud Pub/Sub — a fast messaging service — to connect the security alerts inside your business software to the device-management system. That keeps the gap between spotting a threat and locking the device down to a fraction of a second.

The instruction sent to the device-management system looks like this:

{
  "command": "EraseDevice",
  "uuid": "device_7782_ops_west",
  "options": {
    "obliterate_keys": true,
    "force_reboot": true,
    "lock_window": 0
  },
  "metadata": {
    "reason": "Remote lock-and-wipe active",
    "authorized_by": "System_Automatic_Trigger",
    "security_level": "CRITICAL"
  }
}

Owning Your Software Means Owning Its Security

Owning your software and data means little if someone can walk off with it on a lost tablet. Remote lock-and-wipe keeps your business information inside the company, no matter where the hardware ends up.

Companies that own their software outright don’t stop there — they own the security around it, too.

Infinary Engineering Group