I was shopping for some SSD chips and I noticed some brands have built in GPS on the SSD intended for phones. So if you buy one and put it in an L5, does it ignore the hardware switch? Catch-22?
That… doesn’t make sense without sources and defining what SSD you are referring to. Links to these products?
I did not want to pollute the thought process with brand name bias. But when I read it I was surprised. Now I’ll have to go throught the same shopping process to find it again because I always purge my cache and history.
Edit… yes it made no sense to me either.
As long as the SSD package also has a NEMA feed and antenna connector I see no problem with using it, in fact I love the idea of being able to hardware-kill my computer’s modem or pull the USB dongle, go radio silent, and rely on only a receiver included in the SSD package for satellite-only navigation. There should be no way that a GNSS system can compromise my system that I can think of. I am assuming this is a way to sell lower capacity or speed SSDs during the shortage by value-adding the GNSS module. Web-links or model numbers please.
That is not likely to be possible anyway, I mean physically. Most NVMe drives are too long even to fit. The most common seems to be 2280 form factor i.e. 80mm long, which is way too big. But, OK, it is possible to get NVMe drives in smaller form factors such that it might fit.
Then you would have to sacrifice either the WiFi card or the cellular modem card in order to install the NVMe drive.
And if you did then it probably wouldn’t work in terms of device interface. Let’s say you get an M.2 card with M-keying (i.e. SATA and/or PCIe pins expected by the card to be functional - this is the norm for NVMe disk drives) then I don’t think these pins are connected. The WiFi card has E-keying and the modem card has B-keying so theoretically the SATA and/or PCIe pins are available but I don’t think they actually are.
But let’s say we ignore that difficulty, then yes, the kill switch should work. Whichever card you have sacrificed to put the NVMe drive in, operating the corresponding kill switch should kill it stone dead. (That isn’t a great idea of course. It’s not a great idea to cut power abruptly to a disk drive. You may lose writes and hence corrupt the content of your disk.)
As the card won’t be connected to the GPS antenna (GNSS antenna) it is uncertain as to whether the signal would be good enough ever to get a locational fix.
And finally again ignoring any difficulties so far … the software isn’t actually expecting the disk drive to offer GPS functionality. So it is uncertain as to whether the GPS functionality would be usable. Maybe it needs a special driver, available only for blackbox operating systems.
However maybe SSD chips doesn’t mean NVMe drive. So … can you clarify what you mean by “SSD chips”?
Maybe you meant a SATA SSD? Maybe you meant an SD card in some form factor? Maybe you meant an eMMC drive? Maybe you meant something else?
Well fairly obviously if you buy a computer component that would not normally offer GNSS functionality (i.e. this is unexpected) then I guess it could offer some other unexpected functionality and that might be a compromise of some sort. (For example, if it secretly offers a cellular modem as well or alternatively, less usefully, WiFi/BT as well then the SSD is now a 24x7 tracking device, receiving location fixes from the GNSS part of the package and transmitting location fixes from the other part of the package.)
But let’s say that the only unexpected functionality is GNSS. I think we are talking about defence-in-depth. You can never guarantee 100% that your operating system is not compromised. In a standard Librem 5, if all kill switches are off then even a compromised operating system cannot either gather location fixes or transmit those fixes to a malicious party, either in real time or later on as a batch. If there’s a GNSS hiding in a component that is not killed then a compromised operating system could potentially gather location fixes but at least it couldn’t transmit those fixes in real time.
We would need more details of the hardware to assess the theoretical risk further.
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I probably misinterpreted the text. I never did find it again. But you have to admit, it was an interesting concept tracking you by SSD? Or other replacable parts.
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But can you clarify what you meant by “SSD chips”? Because the answer could be different for each of the interpretation possibilities that I speculated.
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I was shopping for a 1TB backup chip for my laptop. The ones for phones I disregarded as my eyes were scanning the search engine. I don’t remember.
Although the concept of devices doing things unasked for, reminds me of the old covert channel problem in trusted systems, which can occur in any environment. The physical size has simply gotten smaller in 50 years.
So it sounds as if you are talking about an external portable SSD, in which case there is no possibility whatsoever of putting it “in” a Librem 5. You can of course connect such a drive to the Librem 5 but you wouldn’t normally have it permanently connected.
However the general concept of “bonus functionality” 
remains.