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Self-Wiping Hard Drives From Toshiba
Orome1 writes "Toshiba announced a family of self-encrypting hard disk drives engineered to automatically invalidate protected data when connected to an unknown host. Data invalidation attributes can be set for multiple data ranges, enabling targeted data in the drive to be rendered indecipherable by command, on power cycle, or on host authentication error."
Nothing at all, except a motherboard failure now means you lost all your data.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
TrueCrypt is great in most circumstances. But if you need (for example) FIPS140-2 compliance, you' need something more.
Confiscate the computer with a self-encrypting HDD. Boot a live CD, image the HDD. Analyse the image.
Or am I missing the point?
I can only imagine how many IT support types will accidentally wipe these things. How sad and hilarious this will be!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
For storage in devices like printers, etc., where there might be a large amount of storage to facilitate print queuing, etc., I can see how something like this coul be useful. For instance, one of the options on these devices is to self-wipe on power cycle. For companies worried about security, this might be worthwhile in their printers, where the storage itself might be for the purpose of convenience, but they would rather be safe than sorry, and data destruction is of ultimately no consequence because the source for that data is found elsewhere. That way, they can dispose of their printers in relative peace of mind, because if someone powers on the printer to see what it has on it, then poof, no more data. Or even do the "unknown host" thing, and then all you have to do is make it clear to IT that you don't want the valid host (the printer) to survive the disposal process, so if they want to play with some baseball bats in a field to the point of smashing the drive controller... then that's fine with corporate.
Self wiping drives - I had a few of those YEARS ago. They had the added feature that when they were erasing themselves,they alerted the user via a loud screeching sound.
[Insert pithy quote here]
What a ... blog. Yeah. Just go to toshiba.com and read the press release from the source, instead of the cut and pasted partial version at the ... blog:
http://sdd.toshiba.com/techdocs/MKxx61GSYG_release.pdf
They claim it uses AES256.. How do you know its not some kind of simple XOR? Probably their exotic "crypto erasure scheme" which they don't discuss is simply deleting the AES256 key. Where would you store the key? How about in the partition table? How long until there's a patch to linux fdisk to read the key, or at least not overwrite it when partitioning, and then how long until someone uses a loopback crypto file system support until linux to read a drive assuming you previously know the AES256 key?
Also, those drives are small. The last time I bought a 160 GB drive was in the mid 00s. Wouldn't it be hilarious if the low capacity was because everything is stored twice, once "encrypted" for the (l)user and once unencrypted for government special access "only"?
This is just all speculation on top of speculation, yet it all seems strangely likely.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
These drives are intended for embedded application like copy machines and medical equipment. That equipment now has major security holes once it is disposed of. NOT intended for PCs or data center use. HOWEVER, for secure laptops -- they are ideal. If the laptop gets stolen, now, it is trivial to circumvent OS-enforced security and get to the data. In an environment were data backup is handled by the corporate system, if the laptop fails or is lost or the user forgets his password, you ABSOLUTELY want the data in that machine gone forever. Legitimate users of the data will get it, through the proper channels, from corporate backup.
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
You had multiple disk corruption due to a common firmware bug on the drives themselves? That seems like its going to be pretty damn rare.
Happens all the time because most RAID builders buy all their drives in one order from the same vendor. Heck they probably have sequential serial numbers. If there is a bug, they're going to totally lose that array because it'll hit all the drives.
Let me guess, about a year ago or a bit more, he bought a set of Maxstor 541DX, Fireball 3, or DiamondMax Plus 8, the defect lists slowly started filling up, one drive finally failed outright, then during the restore/rebuild process multiple drives also failed because their defect lists filled up during the restoration, then the drive firmware literally crashed on the next boot leaving you with nothing at all but a set of paperweights that don't even show up in the BIOS list? Mmmm, just guessing?
Always better off buying RAID drives from different vendors at different times, if you can.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Or different but better protections. For instance, a drive like this might be in a remote office in China, whereas the backup (or the source of the data) is in some secure location in your home country.