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Seagate Ships World's Most Secure Hard Drive
An anonymous reader writes to let us know that after two years Seagate is finally shipping its full-disk encryption product, and you can get your hands on it in a laptop from system vendor ASI.
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worlds stupidest user with passwords like 'password' :-)
Also how are they using AES? I thought P1619 (XTS-AES) is still a draft. Are they betting it will get adopted unchanged? Or are they using some other thing? Please tell me it's not AES in ECB mode...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
What makes this the most secure?
Is this really any more secure than dm-crypt? Faster, no doubt, but more secure?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Who knows what this thing is doing inside? They're using AES-128 so you may not have to worry about the encryption algo being unsecure, but who's to say this thing isn't caching the password in some place you don't know about (but that the manufacturer and your country's authorities do)?
Liberty in your lifetime
Who cares if this gets cracked by Tuesday, bitches?
The selling point is that the banks wont have to tell you when Bubba leaves his laptop on the CAL TRAIN with your credit card data in standby mode, cause its encrypted!
I feel so safe!
it will transpire that ...Los Alamos National Laboratory misplaced a notebook full of top-secret data in which the encryption had never been turned on... ...a Microsoft executive lost a notebook full of plans for dirty ways to undermine Open Source, after sticking Post-It note to the screen to remind him of his wife's birthday, which he used as his password... ...all the scientific data from a major NASA mission costing $1.63 billion were stored on a contractor's laptop, who had encrypted all of it, chosen a good password, never wrote it down, and got hit by a bus without telling it to anyone... ...but NASA was able to recover the data by asking the FBI, which knew the backdoor and had been reading every NASA contractor's hard drive without a warrant.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If I put one of these in a regular laptop--one which supports DriveLock, but nothing else--can this disk use the DriveLock password as the encryption key?
If that were the case, it would be a simple matter to retrofit existing laptops (which use DriveLock to protect the disks) with the improved security of full-blown encryption. And it could be done without any perceptible changes to the user!
This could be a great product if they just Keep It Simple so that it works seamlessly with the already widely-deployed ATA Security Mode (DriveLock) protocol.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Because by now, a 3GB SATA controller is cheaper than a PATA controller.
Supply & Demand.
There's a funamental difference here.
Most DRM hinges on the fact that the content must stay readable, in however limited a sense. In other words, you're giving the encrypted content to the attacker, who also has to have the key in order to use it. The attacker and the intended recipient are the same person.
When you take away that requirement, encryption actually becomes workable.
Seagate is an American Company. Is it possible for them to provide a secure product without providing a back door for Big Brother to access? Can they be trusted? I'm very skeptical.
- They sell a lot of drives with a lot of different speeds. It might be cheaper for them to standardize on a few chipsets then to buy different chips and have different designs based on the drive's capability.
- For marketing reasons, they may have decided to always have the latest-and-greatest buzzword on the box of all of their new products.
- A major customer asked them to use this interface.
In all, not the strangest decision I've come upon today.W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
...of the competitors in this market space. Several companies have been doing this for years with good track records. I think these links are still good.
You don't have to use the fingerprint reader, and my understanding is that it's more of a windows-logon thing than a boot-up thing.
However, you could easily design a keypad that makes it nigh-impossible to lift a print. A simple rough textured finish on the top would do the trick.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Slap one of these bad-boys into a video camera with only the ability to only write/encrypt and then you'll have a tool journalists can use without fear their content will be pilfered by a herd of unwieldly pigs. Only once the cam is back from the field would the data be accessable. This of course assumes the drive uses some sort of PKI, it may be symmetric only, in which case you'd have to add something to generate the symmetric keys from a PKI infrastructure. Performance should still be good with the added PKI module since the internal crypto would still be using the hardware accelerator with the derived symmetric keys.
worlds stupidest user with passwords like 'password' :-)
That's a joke, but some people really think that way. Blaming "stupid users" makes them feel more secure or helps them pass the buck for choosing systems with poor security. When you think about it, it's not very funny.
Passive encryption might be a step in the right direction, but I won't trust it as long as the software doing has owners and secrets kept from users. They can point to specs and tell me what they are doing, but that does not mean they are doing that. The owners can break in at will, the keys can be padded with zeros and finally, the owners can make mistakes.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My highspeed, large-capacity Seagate drive wasn't secure from itself when it decided to critically fail 1 week after warrenty!
The real problem is not designing effective security, but getting people to use it properly. You can start on this by banning PostIt notes from the corporate environment -- or at least make them self-destruct.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The Top 10 Most Secure Hard Drives in Existence to date:
1. The world's most secure hard drive is the one not used to contain valuable confidential data (experts question its existence).
2. Doesn't exist.
3. Doesn't exist.
4. A hard drive that contains some valuable confidential data, but remains physically within a datacenter. The OS that accesses it does not share its data with other OSes, and runs the full gamut of controls (prevention, detection, correction).
5. Doesn't exist.
6. Doesn't exist.
7. Doesn't exist.
8. Doesn't exist.
9. A hard drive that contains some valuable confidential data, remains physically within a datacenter, but its OS shares data among other systems whose trust is "unknown" or "uncertain".
And tied for 10th place (by virtue of consolation):
10. An encrypted drive in a mobile device relying upon its user for security.
10. An unencrypted drive in a mobile device relying upon its user for security.
If the "laws of physics" of information security were known, we'd likely see a Newtonian-esque law that says something like (in a more scientific form): "any security system that relies upon a person to use the system correctly will fail [miserably]". What Seagate is trying to do is analogous to defying gravity or creating "information security perpetual motion". It just won't improve the situation for anyone (except perhaps the "checklist security" people who can tell their compliance regulation auditors that they can add a point to their useless overall score).