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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.
You invented random-access memory. Good job!
I've always thought SED stood for "Smoke Emitting Diode"
It's my favorite electronic component, but the only problem is that they only work once.
My bet is on the usual baked-in drive encryption, very badly described.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
From the scant details in the article and summary, it appears that the drives are encrypted, and the "wipe" consists of getting rid of the encryption key.
Calling that a "wipe" is rather misleading in my opinion. Toshiba's in for one hell of a liability issue if their encryption is ever cracked -- though I'm sure they'll take care of all that in the fine print.
This has been covered to death here on slashdot, but basically one pass of /dev/random will pretty much take care of wiping a drive. Drive recovery companies will tell you that the hypothetical bit-by-bit recovery is possible, but is so ungodly costly that it's not worth doing unless there's something REALLY important on the drive (like pictures of your mom). If you're really paranoid, don't waste your time with shred, just dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda twice and call it a day. Shred takes F O R E V E R and really provides nothing more than a nifty status bar. If you're SUPER paranoid, dd the drive twice and yank the platters, play frisbee, build a tesla turbine or simply scratch the hell out of them and chuck them in the recycle bin.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
>Wiping a 500gb drive takes several hours at least.
Not really. The problem is that everyone picks some zany wiping scheme. Those Gutmann patterns don't even make sense with any modern drive. All you really need to do is zero the drive once. It doesn't take that long. I have yet to see a recovery from a drive that's been zero'd out. Anything past one pass of zeros is just extra credit.
All the articles are pretty poorly written, and the Computer World article misquotes the Toshiba press release
Computer World
Drives with the technology will go into hard drives for laptops and desktops.
Toshiba
But lost or stolen notebooks are not the only security risk that IT departments must address. Today, most office copier and printing systems utilize HDD capacity and performance to deliver a highly productive document imaging environment. Many organizations are now realizing the critical importance of maintaining the security of document image data stored within copier and printer systems.
Toshiba is selling these drives as a method for securing scanning copiers. Many of the current copiers hold onto everything that is copied or scanned indefinitely leaving a gaping security hole. The new SED drives encrypt their contents and then wipe the key when the drive powers down leaving the data intact, but no meaningful method for recovering it. If a thief tries to yank a SED drive out of a copier, it automagically wipes it. If part of your security procedure is to shut down the copiers each night, your daily load of potentially secure documents and copies of Bob's butt are also automagically wiped.
Clearly, this type of technology would be worthless in a notebook or any other type of PC. You'd always be running from outlet to outlet to save your data. It'd be an IT version of that terrible Jason Statham movie Crank 2: High Voltage. Shudder.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes