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The Always-Encrypted Firewire Hard Drive

Posted by timothy on from the only-terrorists dept.

ducman points to the announcement of an encrypted hard drive running on the MacNN website. The drive features a DES 64-bit/ 40bit key strength and "is intended for use by banks, insurance providers, government agencies, and those individuals with sensitive digital intellectual property. It supports the IEEE 1394a connectivity standard, in addition to USB 1.1 and 2.0. It offers data transfer rates over FireWire 400 of 100, 200, or 400 Mbps. The SuperGuard is expected to be available February 7." Sounds great -- but the USB key stuck in the back looks like a likely point of failure.

6 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. worthless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the key length is too short.

  2. 3rd post! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Encrypted loopback devices on linux and bsd (and MacOS) are easier and cheaper.

    And more secure IMHO.

  3. Wow super secure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And it only took 6.4 seconds to crack into once the harddrive was hooked up to a standard PC.

    Anyone in here actually read Applied Cryptography? This was 1995 when it was published, and especially for bank use, you'd NEVER use anything less than a 128 bit key.

    Also, did they say DES or 3DES? Hasn't DES been cracked?

  4. What's their definition of OS independent by BrianUofR · · Score: 3, Insightful

    From the article:

    *Device driver free, operating system independent

    *Microsoft Windows98 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Mac OS compatible

    First off, how can it be OS independent and have a list of compatible OS's? If it's a hardware-based solution, then how can some OS's not work with it?

  5. Encrypted? by SirCrashALot · · Score: 3, Insightful
    # Real-time 64-bit/ 40-bit DES (Data Encryption Standard)
    I hope this is a joke.... DES is no longer secure, hence the creation of AES. Why build a device that uses DES when there are machines that can crack it in a few days that cost only $25,000. The more money you have to spend, the faster you can crack it. DES Cracking machine
    An encrypted drive is a cool idea, but i would much rather use CFS (crypted file system) on a regular drive than this. DES offers no security to the people who want your data.
  6. Drive Failure by po8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...the USB key stuck in the back looks like a likely point of failure.

    Conceivably. Anyone who is running one of these drives without backups somewhere is even more insane than the folks running un-encrypted drives without backups. The backups themselves can easily be encrypted, so there's no need for major security risk. If your key dongles stop working or your drive fries, you'd better have some way of getting the bits back from outside, 'cause they're not coming from the platter.

    OTOH, what is "64-bit/ 40-bit DES" supposed to be? Presumably this means the drive supports "40-bit watered-down DES keys" and "64-bit normal DES blocks". So I guess I'm wrong: this drive is designed to be break-inable in an emergency. Great. I'll wait until they offer 3DES or AES-128 options, thanks.

    In the meantime, check out the BSD Cryptographic disk driver cgd: SW on-disk encryption at the block level.