Hey guys, for the past few years, I have been working on a reusable tamper-evident jar for storing physical items.

The idea is that the lid creates a random physical “fingerprint” every time you close it. Inside the lid are thousands of tiny black and white balls. When you twist the jar open or closed, they mix. Once the jar is closed, the unique pattern is locked in place.

You can take a photo of that pattern with your phone, and later compare it to check whether the jar has been opened. If someone opens it, the pearls mix again and the original pattern is gone. The second pic shows a gif of two different patterns compared to one another, showing it is easy to tell that the lid was opened.

I made it because I wanted a simple physical way to store things like hard drives, USB sticks, authentication keys, documents, etc. Basically anything that you would do want to know if someone has accessed it.

After a lot of hard work and prototyping, I'm happy to announce it's finally complete! Check it out on https://www.entropyseal.com/.

Happy to hear feedback. I’m especially interested in whether the concept is clear and what use cases come to mind. :)

Edit: seems there some common questions, so I'll add some FAQs below:

Do the balls move around when the entropyseal is moved or handled?
No, the balls are held firmly in place when the lid is closed tight. So you can handle the entropyseal without the pattern breaking.

What if you twist the jar instead of the lid?
The pattern still changes. There are pins inside the lid that stir the balls around when twisting either the lid or jar.

What if I open the lid very slowly as not to disrupt the pattern?
The pattern will still change because of the pins inside the lid that stir the balls around when twisting open the lid.

EDIT:

Hey all, thanks for the feedback! After taking a look again we agree the price of 100 USD / 93EUR was a bit too steep. So we reduced the price to 70 USD / 61 EUR. We want to make this product as accessible to everyone as possible, so we don't want price getting in the way.

Hello,

My wife and I recently crossed a Chinese border where the police installed software on our Android devices (her Moto x4 and my Huawei Mate 9).

I saw the installation process, an icon appear on the home screen, the police ran the application and then the icon hid itself. Not sure if it rooted my phone or what. I know something was running on my phone because they used a handheld device to confirm our phones were communicating with their system before letting us go.

Anyone have any suggestions on what steps to take to confirm there is no surveillance software or anything remaining on my phone? I'd like to do as thorough of a wipe as I can...

Thanks for any suggestions!