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Universal Disk Encryption Spec Finalized
Lucas123 writes "Six of the largest disk manufacturers, along with encryption management software vendors, are backing three specifications finalized [Tuesday] that will eventually standardize the way encryption is used in firmware within hard disk drives and solid state disk drive controllers ensuring interoperability. Disk vendors are free to choose to use AES 128-bit or AES 256-bit keys depending on the level of security they want. 'This represents interoperability commitments from every disk drive maker on the planet,' said Robert Thibadeau, chief technologist at Seagate Technology."
Why should this be trustable?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
How can we trust their implementation?
... it's TPM glue for hard drives. The spec says almost nothing about encryption and authentication, it's just a bunch of TPM command and control mechanisms for hard drives. The IEEE P1696 working group is the one working on secure hard-drive encryption. Unfortunately the TPM people have better PR people than the CS and EE types doing the IEEE work do.
brick your hardrive. Now it's secure.
here are "on the PLANET". Looks like they've got a bit more work to do before EVERYONE agrees to do this.
Just phone in a threat to an elected official, and the NSA will unlock the drive remotely for you. A handy service, and so responsive...
Hard drive encryption doesn't really offer much to a machine sitting in a data center though. The real value is on laptop hard drives where there is a much greater chance of having your machine stolen at some point. Built-in full disk encryption will help prevent the crook from getting at all of your data.
I read the internet for the articles.
If the keys are burned in, are they then supplied to the various law enforcement agencies to make things easier on them?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Can any storage gurus explain the real-world benefit to this? Is it currently impossible to encrypt a RAID volume built on two different manufacturers' disks?
Why not just use TrueCrypt pre-boot system partition encryption? The benefit of a hardware standard is not immediately clear to me.
but has it been pretty well established that there are no significant backdoors, or backdoor techniques, related to the existing AES algorithms? I.e., 128 and 256?
What good would hardware encryption be unless we were pretty well assured that even the NSA would be stymied?
It is not a matter of doing anything illegal, of course, but encryption is encryption. If there are reasonable methods available to break it, then it ain't.
I thought this kind of talk was over the top, then I read the article.
No reset so that you can repartion the thing? Users are supposed to trust the hardware won't betray them? No way. It's like they are trying to clog landfills with these things.
The whole article reeks of "trusted path" and other defective by design tech beyond the obvious "oops, I forgot the password" inevitability. To be trusted by sane users, the controller boards must come with easy to change free software doing the dirty work. If not, all sorts of malicious features can be hidden that negate all benefits of hardware encryption. These things could turn themselves if "premium" content is ever placed on the drive and then accessed with a "non trusted" OS, for example. Your data is never secure when you use non free software, it is always at the mercy of the software's owner. This kind of "firmware" is something that should be rejected.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Universal Disk Encryption Spec Cracked. Available on 0dayz haxx0r b0ardz!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
So, do[es any of] these standards make it easier for a gov't or other organization to notice that someone (eg, a journalist) has got his/her data (eg, article, photo's, interview audio, important video clips, etc.) encrypted on a device, ie, as they try to sneak from, say, within a war zone (closed to journalists) back to friendly soil?
If so, which encryption software (eg, Trucrypt, etc.) - that DOESN'T adhere to standards - will save this journo's life and/or media, in the above situation?
You're kind of missing the point. If our hypothetical journalist is caught crossing a border, the guards won't pull the hard drive and check the make, and then hook it up to their own gear to see if it's encrypted or not. They'll point their AKs at the journo and make him turn his laptop on. If he refuses, they shoot him. If it prompts for a password and he refuses to enter it, they shoot him. If he claims he forgot the password, they'll toss him and his laptop into the back of the truck to send him to the capital to receive 'enhanced interrogation'. No encryption software will save his life. The guards probably won't know or care about encryption.
If I were that journo, I'd encrypt the files themselves and rename them crash.dump and put them in the Windows directory so I can turn it on, let them scan for jpegs and avis and find nothing, and be sent on my way.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
If the password protection is only blocking the drive's firmware, but the data is not encrypted on disk, it's a very weak protection. Someone stealing your disk only has to find a disk of the same model, and exchange the platters.
If someone has Truecrypt on their hard drive and the police raid your house for some server and they take that encrypted drive, there is nothing stopping you from saying, "I forgot my password... oops." But if you trust the hardware, then what stops the police from going after that hard drive manufacturer and putting the legal pressure on them to provide a back entrance and/or technical help? The idea that the government won't put a legal squeeze on the hard drive manufacturer the second they think they've come upon a child pornography/warez/other horrible illegal things seems absurd to me. I understand that manufacturers of things like flash drives and such have had hardware encryption before, but it hasn't been widespread and mainstream. When you throw in the "average citizen" factor, I think we'll see all kinds of challenges and laws spring up.
-- And as always IANAL, but I do read Slashdot!!
"The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec^2" -Marcus Dolengo
It looks like they're using the "Opal" standard as a way of selling essentially the same hard drive slightly crippled since if you don't have the key for the thing you "can't even sell it on eBay", whereas admins can "cryptographically erase" their data with ease. Does this mean that the well priced one has a one-key no-reselling system, and the artificially inflated "server" class one can be rotated? I'm going to ere on the side of "companies get together in order to hurt us all" and fear the worst.
Nothing says you can't use Truecrypt or what have you on top of the hardware-based encryption built into the hard drive.
This way you'll have AT LEAST as much protection as you would've with just your software-based encryption.
- The race is not [always] to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. -
I worked for a company that shipped encrypted firmware. We were required to send the keys to the NSA.
This use-case is more or less dying out though. Because transporting bits across a border by having someone hand-carry them is just too large a risk, assuming it's the kind of bits the government of either country would rather not have crossing the border.
Much better to transmit the bits out, in encrypted form, over some kind of network. Even if there's no internet, you can always do it over satelite-phone or something. Yeah, I know that's like $3/minute, but how many minutes do you need to transmit the ascii-text of an interview or something ?
It's sligthly more of a problem if it's something largish, particularily if it's HD-video though, but even this problem is going away. Even if you're in Iran, it's not very hard to find an access-point with a megabit or more of capacity.
There's no question; the safest way to store "dangerous" bits on your laptop while crossing a border, is to NOT store them on there at all. They can't find what is genuinely not there.
What' is this then ?
http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads2.php
Source Code ?
I have not compiled it, nor gone through it in detail, but it looks like source code to me.
D
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
And yet, somehow I don't believe you.
To be more specific, I find it illogical to assume that the NSA would require you to provide them with the keys and at the same time let you talk about it.
Given this, I am suspicious of your claim in the extreme.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
How short-sighted is it to tie into one encryption standard? Idiots.
You need to *at least* make various encryptions pluggable and software-upgradeable because I guarantee that Murphy's Law says that once EVERYONE has one of these hard drive, AES will be cracked sufficiently and we'll be back to square one but tied into millions of devices incorporating a useless and obsolete security "standard. It'll be WEP all over again, even down to 99% of people being "assured" that their hard drive is safe, and then finding out the reality.
Plus, the DRM potential is obvious. I thought the ATA standard had the facility to implement disk encryption anyway - isn't that one of the features used on the XBox or something to lock the hard drives to a particular machine? - you have to send a password across the bus as an ATA packet before the drive will permit any access at all.
Good point. clampolo, care to comment?
clampolo?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Read about where the bottlenecks are before suggesting nonsense.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm not as worried about that as some. Here's how I look at it - if there's a back door, it doesn't matter as long as it doesn't get used. If it gets used even a few times, word will get out. When some ring of baby-rapers gets caught and prosecuted with evidence that was obtained through said back door, word *will* get out.
So what happens then? A million drive purchasers demand their money back. A million businesses that bought the drives because they were guaranteed unbreakable encryption join in class-action lawsuits against the drive manufacturers and resellers, blasting them into legal oblivion.
If I were a drive manufacturer, I wouldn't risk it. The secret would eventually leak and my company would be toast, overnight.
"Disk vendors are free to choose to use AES 128-bit or AES 256-bit keys depending on the level of security they want"
More likely, they will choose based on the power of the controller. Nobody would want less security.