Somewhat OT, encryption question

[Bill Oliver]

I was thinking about the infamous "code purple error" for HP computers, where Windows is keyed to the hardware of the machine.  If you swap out a hard drive or change a card, it won't boot.  Apparently, there is a "tattoo" of various hardware identifiers in static memory somewhere and the OS matches a code put in during installation with that number.

For the HP issue, the fix is easy -- you just delete the command to check during boot up.  But, I was thinking about this as an encryption option -- where one could encrypt files in a way that automatically incorporates hardware information with the passphrase.  That way, if someone were to intercept a file and knew your passphrase, they would still not be able to decrypt the file unless they did it on one specific machine.

Is there anything like that for fedora?  It would probably be pretty easy to hack the gpg source code to add a few lines to append system information to the passphrase, but if there's something already around, I'd like to play with it...

billo