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ABIT's Secure IDE Motherboard
Frank Caviggia writes "The Inquirer has a story about ABIT's spiffy new IC7-MAX3 motherboard. Apparently, this motherboard has a feature called 'Secure IDE,' which is marketing-speak for hardware-based encryption ... ABIT goes on to claim that 'Secure IDE' 'will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files.' Pretty bold claims for a motherboard maker ..."
How many more comments like this will there be? If you click the stupid link, you see that you need a USB key each time you boot if you want to be able to decrypt the hard drive. They need the MB, the HD, and your key.
ABIT's site shows a little key that contains the decoder.
By following these easy instructions, you too can encrypt your data and swap partitions with Loop-AES. (The instructions are for Linux From Scratch, but they worked fine on my Debian box.) This way, no unencrypted data ever touches the disk; even if your computer is stolen, the thief can't read your data.
As I mentioned here, the key appears to be a USB memory stick put into a proprietary SUB port on some kind of daughter card. There's a diagram here.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
I've seen some high-security encryption keys that you basically keep on a keychain with you all the time. They have a "panic button" on them that destroys (either electronically, or physically) the internal memory, making recovery of the encryption key impossible.
Although I havn't seen them, I'd imagine it would be easy to make one with a built-in clock of some sort, so if you didn't correctly utilize the key every so-often, it would automatically self-destruct.
Of course, they're probably rather more expensive than what ABIT is proposing.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Also, here's the key.
Not going to stop the RIAA from catching you (although they'd have difficulty decrypted the drive once they did I guess), but looks moderately useful for protecting a harddrive from theft. I'd love one on a laptop. If someone stole it in an airport or somesuch - at least they couldn't get my data without some effort.
I write code.
Hmm, don't mind me while I keep using a software solution...
/home on my laptop. Otherwise you're SOL...
: //loop-aes.sourceforge.net/loop-AES.README - see example 4
Loop-AES is trivially ease to set up under linux,
and you can have it require a GPG key etc that live on a USB keychain.
If you have my keychain, and you know the password, you can mount
http://sourceforge.net/projects/loop-aes/
http
Something you have and something you know...
Nope. You have to click on the article, and click on the "Secur" picture. THere you will see that the drive connects to a daughter-card thingy, that also has a USB connection, and at the end is a USB keychain--which has your special key.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Looking at their user manual, and specs, here are some corrections to your post:
- No special motherboard needed. This thing plugs in between the ide cable and the driver.
- As with all encryption. Lose the key and you're the proud owner of a high tech paperweight. Not unique to this connector.
- I suspect they mention fdisk because it's commonly used. It's a transparent encryption system, so
card + drive = normal drive
They're just saying to reformat the drive after putting the adapter on.
- Any file system/operating system will do. "Device driver free" too. Again, they're just saying you have to start over.
Also worth noting:
- The encryption card can use an extension cable get the dongle to the outside of the case. So no, you don't have to pop the cover each time you walk away.
- Once you boot up, the key doesn't need to be in any more.
- They give you a backup key too.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
This is a bit offtopic, but I think it's valuable for anyone wanting to know about encryption - really GOOD encryption when someone's life/freedom may be on the line.
One of the biggest problems with regards to encryption (aside from snakeoil salesmen) is that if someone suspects/knows you're using encryption, they're going to try and get the key out of you. Either by legal means like locking you away in a hole for years until you make with the key, or just resorting to good old fashioned torture to make you cough up the info. Neither option is particularly appealing, so a rather smart solution to the problem was devloped.
Naturally, it's called "Rubberhose" (The website)
The gist of it is that you make a large container file (say, 1gb for example). Inside that container file, are many smaller container files, each one having their own encryption key. You'd have one container with moderate-level stuff that you could "give up" if forced, and another container with the "real good stuff" that you'd get imprisoned/killed if the badguys discovered it.
The interesting way that it works is that in order to get access to the "real good stuff", you need to input the keys to all of the other containers to both decrypt the containers in question, and to fully map the filesystem. No container knows about any other container, nor where it's data is stored inside the 1gb file. Of course the data isn't stored in contigious blocks, and the containers could be fragmented into millions of pieces interwoven with eachother. It's also impossible to "prove" by any means that another container even exists.
So you can open any container and see the info inside it, but all of the containers appear to utilize the entire 1gb of storage space. You never know that anything other than empty space exists in the drive.
It's kind of complex, and I may not have explained it all that well, so before jumping on me, please read up at the website.
It's absolutely elegant, although perhaps not currently easy enough to be utilized by the masses. Still, if I was going into hostile territory, this would be the first thing I got operational on my portable equipment.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle