Self-Encrypting Western Digital Hard Drives Easy To Crack

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @09:20PM from the don't-roll-your-own-encryption dept.

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.

1 of 74 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

TrueCrypt by dinfinity · 2015-10-20 22:07 · Score: 3, Informative

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).