The Always-Encrypted Firewire Hard Drive

Posted by timothy on Saturday February 1, 2003 @07:20AM 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.

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worthless by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-01 07:26 · Score: 5, Insightful

the key length is too short.
3rd post! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-01 07:29 · Score: 5, Insightful

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

And more secure IMHO.
Wow super secure by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-01 07:30 · 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?