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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...
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.
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
The risk is that the drive may, unbeknownst to the owner, cache and store the encryption keys somewhere inside the drive, either on the media or in nonvolatile memory, making it available to those that know where to find it.
Even if the standard drive firmware doesn't do that, how would you know that the firmware of the drive wasn't modified sometime after manufacture and before purchase to install such a back door?
If you were an agent of some government that wanted to be able to access data on disk drives whose owners believe them to be encrypted, what better way to do that than to either convince the drive vendors to install a back door for you, or to let you tamper with the drives at some point in the process? That would eliminate a whole lot of hassle for you, and there are only a few drive vendors you'd have to subvert.
I think I'll stick to LUKS and dm-crypt. It's not a perfect solution, and it's still possible that someone could subvert my encryption, but doing it in the software I have some measure of control over clearly makes it harder for them than doing it in hardware that I have no choice but to trust blindly.
Am I paranoid? Sure. Probably no one is trying to steal my keys or my data. But the likelyhood of the existence of a back door has NOTHING to do with whether the bad guys (or maybe the good guys?) are interested in my data. Even if no one intends to steal my data today, once a back door exists it can be used against me in the future.
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
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
Good point. clampolo, care to comment?
clampolo?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.