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New Two-Headed Hard Drive Intended To Secure Web Sites
dlur writes: "This article states that Scarabs (In Japanese), a Japanese company, is developing a hard drive with two heads, one read-only and another that is read/write. With this comes two cables, the read-only side going to the external web server, and the r/w cable going to an internal protected server. While this should make it quite a bit tougher for script kiddies to place their mark on a page, I doubt it will stop any real hackers from getting to a site's DB as that would still need to be r/w."
First a 60-foot squid, now a mutant two-headed hard drive. What next, the announcement of the Bearded Lady Linux distro?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
This sounds like a nice drive to use in TiVo-type units as well, so that the read head can return data as the r/w head updates the media, rather than flopping the only head back and forth.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
It seems a malicious user could still attempt to serve defaced pages off of a ram disk on the compromised machine. Yes, a reboot will fix the problem, but that's only slightly more convenient than restoring a compromised system from backups. Furthermore, I suspect that the read-only harddrive would encourage admins to become lazier with regard to applying server patches, since the system would be perceived as "secure".
Too easy... Must resist!
Nah, forget it.
"I mean, two heads are better than one."
As Timothy points out, this only prevents script kiddies from being able to modify existing content using a backdoor or whatnot. However, it won't do anything about denial of service attacks, since the server software and its modules/plugins are all in RAM, and will still be receiving inputs. Buffer overflows and whatnot are still possible. However, defacements will at least go away, and those are the second-most high-profile types of attacks, as they're visible to the general public. Database attacks would be the worst, though, since, as Timothy again points out, they must be writeable.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
You don't need to write to the disk to make a compromised server serve up bogus content.
Furthermore, we can already do this same thing by mounting a network file system (say) in read-only mode. Other than being funky, what's the point?
Remember you can do the SAME thing with the hard drive you currently own and a CD drive. Here are some simple instructions...
/mnt/cdrom
A create your website
B burn it to CD
C modify httpd.conf, document root, set to
Voila! and I didn't need to hire a team of japanese researchers to figure it out either.
This would completely screw up any modern OS (or Windows).
The OS assumes that it, and it alone, modifies the disk, and that the disk won't change state without the OS making that change. This is one of the reasons you don't want to allow raw disk access from a VMWare or DOSemu session to a mounted file system - the emulated OS will access the disk, and the host OS's file system won't know about it. Boom! Instant corrupted file system.
In the case of this double-ended drive, the web server will assume that, since it has read the disk once, it needn't read that sector again. Then the write side computer modifies the disk, and the web server won't pick it up.
I'd rather see a disk with dual heads, and the logic to allow the system to read different sectors at the same time, all kept coherent by the drives controller as a way to increase throughput.
But to use this as a protection on a web server is just plain dumb.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Sure, this new drive can protect existing data from destruction, but we need protection from the wrong people reading the information that's already in a website.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
So sayeth the article:
Hackers will be unable to attack Web sites protected by a new security system unless they can change the laws of physics, according to Naoto Takano
I'm working on it all ready. So far I've managed to get the relativity theory down to E/2 = MC^(1.9)
And standard Earth Gravity now has a value of 8.8m/s/s.
Up.
And don't try to fill up a garbage bag anytime soon. I've been playing with volume. They're now "Garbage Bags of Holding."
Great.
/. ever taken a security class? /. ever worked in on security projects and/or audits?
Now, we have to explain one more thing to VCs and MBAs. All they know is there is this thing called a website that exists on a thing called a webserver.
Hasn't anyone on
Has anyone on
Let me break it down for the rest of you:
This ads exactly zero extra security for a well-run website. Most well-run sites already have seperately firewall'd http-webservers and database machines. Some well-run sites have the application server on yet a third firewall'd network (or vlan etc).
Any place worth 5cents will not have valued data sitting on an httpd server!
This is really Ooooga-Boooga in a nutshell for VCs and MBAs trying to make a buck on security-scared VCs and MBAs running other companies.
I don't buy it.
Secure your site properly - as one other poster mentioned, for the less-funded (read: cheap/poor/startup/blah) company/service you can simply mount a CD-R with your site's static content on it. Even JSPs can live on a CDr (as long as they're precompiled into servlets, or there's a scratch disk for the JSP-container to compile them).
From the article:
"The original idea of a hard disk having two heads emerged around 1985..."
Funny that the technology hasn't been implemented after all this time... Or has it?
From the StorageReview.com reference section:
"Such hard disks have been built. Conner Peripherals, which was an innovator in the hard disk field in the late 1980s and early 1990s (they later went bankrupt and their product line and technology were purchased by Seagate) had a drive model called the Chinook that had two complete head-actuator assemblies: two sets of heads, sliders and arms and two actuators. They also duplicated the control circuitry to allow them to run independently. For its time, this drive was a great performer. But the drive never gained wide acceptance, and the design was dropped. Nobody to my knowledge has tried to repeat the experiment in the last several years.
There are several reasons why it is not practical to make a drive with more than one actuator. Some are technical; for starters, it is very difficult to engineer. Having multiple arms moving around on a platter makes the design complex, especially in small form factors. There are more issues related to thermal expansion and contraction. The heat generated inside the hard drive is increased. The logic required to coordinate and optimize the seeks going on with the two sets of heads requires a great deal of work. And with hard disk designs and materials changing so quickly, this work would have to be re-done fairly often.
However, the biggest reasons why multiple actuators designs aren't practical are related to marketing. The added expense in writing specialty electronics and duplicating most of the internal control components in the drive would make it very expensive, and most people just don't care enough about performance to pay the difference. Hard disks are complex technology that can only be manufactured economically if they are mass-produced, and the market for those who would appreciate the extra actuators isn't large enough to amortize the development costs inherent in these fancy designs. It makes more sense instead to standardize on mass-produced drives with a single actuator stack, and build RAID arrays from these for those who need the added performance. Compare a single 36 GB drive to an array of four 9 GB drives: in effect, the array is a 36 GB drive with four sets of everything. It would in most cases yield performance and reliability superior to a single 36 GB drive with four actuators, and can be made from standard components without special engineering."
So, from the looks of things, it would be easier and cheaper to use single-head drives in easy-to-put-together configurations than put two heads in the same drive. Admittedly, the StorgeReview.com reference's author didn't mention setting up a read-only/read-write scheme, but the logic still works. I'd guess that it would still be easier to make a RAID container that provides read-only access on one channel and read-write on another.
Again, from the article:
"Scarabs is also working on a different version of the technology--instead of putting two heads on a hard disk, the company is connecting two SCSI interface circuits to a conventional hard disk with one head, one set to send read-only electronic signals and the other to send read/write signals."
This company already knows that their gimmick drive won't sell. No one will buy an over-priced drive with higher probability of failure over a (comparatively) cheap SCSI trick that requires no extra moving parts.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Instead of saying that the sun can burn you, he told someone sitting in a dark closet that they are going to get burnt if they stay there. Still maybe not flamebait, but if you are going to type in l33t to look cool, at least read the article.
Xaotik Designs