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Self-Encrypting Western Digital Hard Drives Easy To Crack
New submitter lesincompetent writes: Security researchers have found severe flaws in the encryption methods used in certain hard drives from Western Digital. Quoting the abstract should be enough to show how dire the situation is: "We will describe the security model of these devices and show several security weaknesses like RAM leakage, weak key attacks and even backdoors on some of these devices, resulting in decrypted user data, without the knowledge of any user credentials." The paper by Alendal, Kison and modg is available here in PDF format.
I used an external WD hard drive for my backups, but it decided to not speak to the computer anymore last week. I assume it's the USB interface has died as it's no longer recognized by the computer.
So I pulled the drive out of it and plugged it in as in internal drive to the desktop computer. It could see the drive so it was still working, but it could not recognize the format of it.
Research showed me that western digital use a hardware encryption chip on the driver board to protect user data.
So if someone steals the hard drive out of my external drive they won't be able to read my data. If, on the other hand they steal the whole external hard drive, they will have the encryption chip too and can just plug it into their usb and read everything of mine.
This seems a spectacularly useless feature which just makes life hard for me - but maybe I can fix it now !
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
I always thought that encryption should be handled by the OS -- not the drive, and that these "encrypting hard drives" are a gimmick to add one bullet point to the retail box and lure non-technical buyers.
I bought one of the WD Passport drives, but I immediately decided that I didn't want to rely on a harddisk manufacturer for security and encryption (or deal with potentially very crappy software).
So I just created a TrueCrypt partition and now sometimes deal with the very slight inconvenience of having to mount it (and with the risk that TC has actually become less safe than the alternatives, of course).
The researchers managed to break in because of gross design and implementation errors. Even venerable and well-known (and utterly stupid) faults like low-entropy key generation make several appearances, as do possibilities to simply read keys from EEPROM or disk or keys encrypted with a static key and stored on the device itself without the need to do so. The only valid conclusion is that none of the "engineers" involved have any reasonable level of experience and knowledge as to how to implement cryptography right. As a consequence they all fail.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
have always been weak and compromised like this. Stick to the Japanese brands. Yes, they are slightly more expensive, but they are secure, and as tests have clearly shown they are considerably more rugged and with a longer life-span.
"Quoting the abstract should to be enough" Business as usual on /. then.
I knew I needed to stop reading Slashdot and finish my PhD when I started to miss articles by Bennett Haselton.
Can anyone think of a case where the encryption on these drives is somehow useful to the owner?
If the owner isn't in control the key, then it seems to have a best case scenario of being completely useless, and the average case would have negative value.
If it's not good for security, and it's not good (actually: bad) for reliability, then what's it good for?
From TF-PDF:
So WD by definition knew the AES key the drive was encrypted with. Even if they did everything else perfectly (which they clearly didn't), somebody besides you knew the key. Fail...
"...several security weaknesses like RAM leakage, weak key attacks and even backdoors on some of these devices, resulting in decrypted user data, without the knowledge of any user credentials."
I know I'm simply stunned by this hard-to-believe finding.
It's almost like somebody somewhere intended for the drive to be able to be read in spite of all the super-duper-mega-awesome data protection whatchamacallit stuff.
Either that or all of the engineers at Western Digital involved in designing this thing are utter morons who have no idea what they're doing.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I'll let my OS handle my encryption, but thanks anyway.
I'm leery enough putting data in LUKS containers (a complex piece of software that I have only a basic understanding of, and skimming the source does little to improve that understanding) and relying on onboard AESNI acceleration (built into the chip, so I have about zero control over that shit) to speed it up, so I don't need or want a vendor making their own half assed attempt at trying to keep my data "safe"
Should anybody be the least bit surprised? The NSA has incredible leverage here.
NSA: We'd like you to not put too much effort into your encryption features.
WD: Why would we do that?
NSA: You'll do it if you want our $100 million contract to supply hard drives to our massive data centers.
The NSA has been doing this with telecom companies for decades. And they probably buy enough equipment to be able to manipulate _all_ the hard drive vendors this way. Plus, unlike with routers or other similar hardware or services, subverting hard drive encryption won't have much of a negative impact on public security, and none with respect to network security. Hard drive encryption is only useful for preventing physical attack, but in the vast majority of cases the physical attackers will be the gov't, not criminal syndicates or hackers.