[Cryptography] Rubber-hose resistance?

[Nico Williams]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 01:35:23PM -0500, erik wrote:
> I was talking recently with a few buddies, and the idea came up that there 
> ought to be a Trezor or Ledger-type wallet out there that somehow won't work 
> if you have an exceedingly high heart rate, combined with some other sort of 
> indicator.  The idea was that if someone ever wanted to steal your bitcoins, 
> they could do it by scaring you into just sending them your bitcoins. If, 
> however, people set up a wallet that wouldn't let them spend their bitcoins if 
> they were under duress, using some menagerie of biometric indicators for 
> authentication as well as duress detection, that this might make it harder for 
> people to mug bitcoin owners. 

If you were being extorted hard enough, you'd take a sedative to reduce
your heart rate back to the point where you could fool the device.
That's assuming there were no other way to fool the device (which, being
biometric, there would be).

> What do you guys think?

There is no such thing as rubber-hose resistance.