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New Toshiba Drives Wipe Data When Turned Off
CWmike writes "Toshiba on Tuesday introduced a new hard drive feature that can wipe out data after the storage devices are powered down. The Wipe feature in Toshiba's SED (Self-Encrypting Drives) will allow for deletion of secure data prior to disposing or re-purposing hard drives, Toshiba said. The technology invalidates a hard-drive security key when a system's power supply is turned off. The new Wipe capability will go into future versions of the SED drives, for which no timeframe was given. Beyond use in PCs, Toshiba wants to put this feature on storage devices in copiers and printers."
I can see this used not just in copiers where temporary files need to be zapped for privacy reasons, but in a number of other places:
1: Photo kiosks. /tmp. If one thinks about it, this type of HDD is absolutely perfect for the /tmp filesystem in the classic sense of it being zeroed out on reboot.
2: Documents stored on public access computers.
3: Medical terminals used for X-ray viewing.
4: Cash register terminals for storing CC data.
5: CCTV DVRs. If a video time frame needs flagged for long term copying, it is.
6: Proxy/sendmail log servers where logs don't have to be kept for longer than it takes to check if there is an intrusion.
7: Temporary scratch space for a database server, say to pack and unpack normally encrypted BLOB/CLOB data.
8: A special hard disk just for
9: Temporary scratch space when unarchiving data and putting it on a secure partition or tape drive. For example, getting data from tape or another site, storing it temporarly to get a machine to restore locally.
10: A machine set up and automatically imaged for guests to browse the Web.
11: A machine set up and autoimaged in a student computer lab. This way, a power cycle ensures that private data is not recoverable from the previous student.
12: Drives set up for swap. This way, a power cycle removes all traces of a virtual machine's paging.
13: Community clouds, where a VM is cloned to the drive, used to give better capacity, then shut down and the drive cycled so the next user on that drive doesn't have access to the previous user's data.
14: A place to decode encryption keys temporarly pulled out of a HSM to be copied to another source.
15: Airport X-day machines so the private pictures of people stay private.
Remember RAM disks? Kind of an eighties thing I guess..
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
My bet is on the usual baked-in drive encryption, very badly described.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
This isn't "reimage on boot". This is encrypted storage whereby the key is volatile. There is not performance problem here.
/tmp, but there's really no point. Cleaning /tmp with software can be done pretty quickly - why buy expensive hardware?
and to reply to OP, this tech really doesn't have as many uses are you say. It is really only useful for sensitive data. You can use it for
AccountKiller
Well, the local copy, anyway...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Of course there that unfortunate possibility that the drive had just decided to relocate the sensitive data and mark it as unusable, in which case shred is no better than urandom..
That's why the really paranoid can always pull out the platter and inflict whatever thermite hell they want on it.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
[Put] /tmp/ on tmpfs [and] enlarge the default swap size by what is expected for /tmp/, to make sure max virtual memory capacity doesn't suffer.
Once you start using tmpfs, sensitive information will accumulate in the swap file. This makes pseudo-volatile drives like these even more suited for item 12 (swap).
Toshiba's in for one hell of a liability issue if their encryption is ever cracked
A meaningful crack for industry-standard ciphers such as AES would make just about every firm in the IT world "in for one hell of a liability issue".
But somehow I don't think that the global market for tmp/swap drives is the Next Big Thing.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,