Seagate announces hardware FDE for laptop and desktop machines

[Ivan Krstić]

On Oct 3, 2007, at 4:39 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
> But this exhibits an issue with disk-based encryption: you can't
> really know what they are doing, and if they are doing it right.
> (Given countless examples of badly-deployed cryptography, this isn't
> just paranoia, but a real concern.)

Precisely. If you're keeping secrets from your nosy siblings and  
coworkers, hardware FDE is more than adequate. If you have reason to  
believe someone skilled and resourceful might really want your data,  
you almost certainly have no business using a blackbox encryption  
system operating in a way that's not publicly documented -- even if  
the system is buzzword-compliant -- and implemented by a company  
(hard disk vendor) where crypto is about as far from their core  
competency as you can get.

--
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org
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