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.

1 of 230 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

DES?!!? by patrik · 2003-02-01 07:34 · Score: 5, Interesting

DES has been replaced by Rijndael (AES)in the govt. Or at least that's what's supposed to happen, DeS is no longer secure enough. I would bet that with the huge ammounts of data stored on a disk differential techniques would make it a snap to get the key. What's worse is an easy to crack crypto system that you believe in is worse than no crypto system at all since you're likely to store data on it that you might not store otherwise.

Patrik

--
----------
Just your ordinary BOFH ;)
http://killertux.org