Seagate To Encrypt Data On Hard Drives

Krishna Dagli writes "Seagate, using their new DriveTrust Technology, will automatically encrypt every bit of data stored on the hard drive and require users to have a key, or password, before being able to access the disk drive."

Comments

No back doors?

[pieterh]

Seems unlikely.

Would Seagate really attempt to market a drive that was going to protect pedophiles and terrorists? (Not to mention us ordinary citizens who don't wholly and utterly trust the organs of the state to act systematically in our best interests.)

If so, it's a brave move. But somehow it just seems so unlikely...

Re:No back doors?

[Lumpy]

Which is why smart people use something that give plausible deniability.

truecrypt allows you to create a double encrypted volume. 2 passphrases. 1 - lets your torturers into a set of incriminating looking but innocent files, the other lets you into the real files. there is NO WAY to detect or extract the real files from the planted files.

look innocent to the coppers while you continue to hide the goodies.

looks even better if you have other things that use the same planted password and are your tax info ,etc...

Re:No back doors?

[walt-sjc]

Of course no discussion about back doors or prison is complete without linking to two.

Re:No back doors?

[perrin]

Truecrypt is a nice idea, except that if the interrogators find truecrypt on your harddisk, they may automatically assume you have a hidden volume inside your encrypted volume. It is only when truecrypt is distributed on your distro of choice by default, and is used there regularly to encrypt volumes without a hidden volume, that it provides plausible deniability.

And maybe you don't need it..

[Vellmont]

Unless you're handing classified information, have employees take home thousands of credit cards on laptops, or thousands of medical records on laptops you're probbably not really the target for a drive like this.

If your company does handle this kind of data (or worse), maybe you should be re-examining your role as a sys-admin or manager. It's not all about making your life easier you know. There are of course risks and costs to maintaining a database of passwords, small performance costs for encrypting/decrypting the HD, and possible incompatibilities. There's also risks and costs associated with someone losing the laptop and the big headlines in the newspaper about how your company now looks like a bunch of ass-hats for losing 200,000 CC #s, 50,000 medical records, etc. Security and administration is about managing risk. If the overall risk is lower with this drive (and the price is right), you do it.

Re:Not in my IT department!

[JustASlashDotGuy]

Interesting... You don't want it in your IT Dept, yet we are eagerly awaiting it in our IT Dept. We're not going to go with the Seagate solution, however we are eagerly awaiting the release of Vista so we can take advantage of the BitLocker Encryption. I work for a CPA firm; privacy is pretty important.... especially when you have auditors in the field and the occasional laptop getting stolen. The slight slowness in full harddrive encryption is well worth the price. 99.9% of the users will never notice it.... Excel/Word isn't exactly a HD intensive application. And yes... in the past (5 years ago), we did full HD encryption and it wasn't bad at all (slowness wise). The only issues came into play if you wanted to remove the encyption, or if the drive started to fail and you wanted to boot off a boot disk to grab your data (it was possible, but cumbersome). Hopefully Vista's solution will be more robust. If the trials work out as we hope, full encryption firm wide will be the next step (possibly within 6 to 8 months).