This project is a hardware mechanism to provide secure “two man control” over a data store. It is a USB microSD card reader, but it requires two cards. The data is striped in the style of RAID 0, but the data is also encrypted with a key that is stored in a key storage block on each card. In essence, each card is useless without the other. With possession of both cards, the data is available without restriction, but with only one, the remaining data is completely opaque.

This allows you to securely transport a data set by writing it onto a pair of cards and separately transporting them to a destination for recombination.

The intent is that only the pairing of two cards becomes in any way special. A card pair could be inserted in any Orthrus device and the data would be made available. But with only one card, all you get is half of the data encrypted with a key which you only half-possess.