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Fujitsu HDD with AES 256-bit Encryption
An anonymous reader writes "Fujitsu today updated its 2.5" 320GB hard disk drive with automatic hardware-based encryption to effectively secure data against theft or loss. According to Fujitsu, the MHZ2 CJ series is the first hard disk drive in the world to support the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The drive implements the AES hardware encryption directly into the processor chip of the hard disk drive, resulting in more robust security and faster system performance than software-based encryption."
However disk encryption on the whole can and will slow computers down, not significantly on modern computers but it does.
By transferring the overhead from the CPU to the processor built into the hard drive there is no slow down to the overall performance of the computer
I don't know if any of you linux fans out there have performance/overhead stats on using the device-mapper tool, but for someone who is trying to get the best out of their processor, moving this process from software to hardware is the ideal solution.
This is totally necessary. Keep in mind that this is not geared towards the home enthusiast. In that case, you are right. Those who play around with Linux on their home machines can use the Linux software based encryption.
But in the enterprise, the ease of management of a built-in hardware-based encryption scheme can't be beat. And let's not forget that Window's dominates the enterprise market. Besides a few folk in the engineering department, nobody runs linux on their laptops. It's all Windows.
Having a laptop stolen is a huge concern today. This will help ease that concern.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
Please excuse my ignorance but I fail to understand how this could be faster.
In a modern day computer the bottleneck is the long term storage (HDD, DVD Rom etc). Memory and CPUs are extremely fast by comparison.
So I don't entirely understand how shifting encryption down the IO bus is really helpful.
Plus by doing so you lose tons of functionality and if the implementation gets "broken" (AES gets cracked) then you are kind of stuck unless Fujitsu are going to release an update back-ported to all of their old drives (and a lot of hardware vendors can't even support stuff from a year ago, let alone several).
Plus aren't laptops designed entirely around keeping the hard drive in almost a zero power state as long as it can?
I am intrigued. Perhaps somebody should write a boot sector virus which configures an AES password. That way the drive will become a brick with no possibility of recovery.
Unfortunately, it was not zero if the Ars Technica article is accurate. It was very close to zero, two cached thumbnail pictures, but apparently it was enough.
It's frightening. According to the AT article, numerous computer experts offered their opinions that boiled down to "It's not his fault. The browser put them there and he didn't know they were there or how to remove them."
I would be very afraid of a court that would throw out (supposedly) expert opinions just to gain a conviction with regard to a truly evil (imho) crime.