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.

Comments

Ah good - can I get at my backups now?

[tebee]

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 !

TrueCrypt

[dinfinity]

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).

Re:TrueCrypt

[dinfinity]

I don't really trust VeraCrypt yet.

Last time I checked, it was a product of just one French guy who may not even have a very, very solid understanding of cryptography. Even if he's not malicious, his well-intended changes might be making the product worse rather than better.

I'll reevaluate it at some point in the near future, however.

Re:TrueCrypt

[dinfinity]

Your logic is flawed. Just because something is an assumption doesn't mean it is as unreliable as any other assumption.

Honestly, do you not see the stupidity of trying to lecture me on a decision that has already proven to be the right one and the irony of doing so in the comments on an article that actually provides that proof?
WD's products have proven to suck at cryptography and security. TC has not (yet).
WD makes harddisks. TCs is a product aimed 100% at cryptography and security.

Lumping them both together and implying they are equally unreliable because I haven't done an audit of the code of TC is retarded. Don't force your point of 'nothing is ever completely secure' into this. We know it isn't, yet we still have to try to choose the best of the imperfect options.

Re:TrueCrypt

[dinfinity]

Was it before this report came out? Or are you only jumping on the bandwagon now and post hoc claiming the validity of your decision?

No. I made the decision for the reason I mentioned. My experience with most manufacturers doing things that are outside of their core business is that those things tend to suck (badly).

Prior to this report you'd think that it was a reasonable assumption that a company with a $17B market cap could hire as many cryptography experts as they wanted to work on their products rather than pass it off to the current intern. But no, your decision was not based on any facts but rather an emotional response to your beliefs of the relative merits of each product.

It is irrelevant how many experts they could hire. It is relevant how many experts they probably would hire. They know fuck-all about cryptography and security and are very probably not going to understand how much time and effort is required to do them right. I also don't believe they care enough about doing it right. It's more of an us-too feature than a USP.

But no, your decision was not based on any facts but rather an emotional response to your beliefs of the relative merits of each product. That you made a decision that coincidentally bears out your emotional bias against WD does not negate the fact that an assumption is an unknown and you can't know an unknown, and you did trade one unknown for another.

Fuck you and your strawmen. I already told you that assumptions are not interchangeable (as you imply) and why in this case one assumption specifically is not the other. If you don't have the decency to respond to that, then fuck you.

If you have such faith in TrueCrypt, why do you feel the need to qualify it? Or are you unconsciously admitting that your knowledge about the quality of TrueCrypt is incomplete and you are making an assumption of its fitness of use?

And fuck you again. I never said that I have 'such faith in TrueCrypt' and have clearly and repeatedly indicated from the start that I am aware that it is not perfectly trustworthy. So no, I am not 'unconsciously' admitting shit.

Just accept that you were unjustly talking shit and go away. You're trying to hold on to a very weak and worthless position.

Do not trust firmware or embedded hardware

[gweihir]

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.

Re:Do not trust firmware or embedded hardware

[GrumpySteen]

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.

Hooray for outsourcing engineering to the lowest bidder from India!

Re:Any use of this?

[e70838]

hardware encryption are also a way to fight against open source. First, special drivers have to be develop to handle the features. Second, it suggest that the encryption is handled by the hardware and that there is no benefit in having the OS providing better encryption.

Business as usual

[UberVegeta]

"Quoting the abstract should to be enough" Business as usual on /. then.

NopeNopeNopeNope...

[Aaden42]

From TF-PDF:

These hard drives comes pre-formatted, pre-encrypted

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...

Shocking news

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"...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.