Seagate announces hardware FDE for laptop and desktop machines

Florian Weimer fw at deneb.enyo.de
Thu Oct 4 06:37:12 EDT 2007


* 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.

I think the really interesting question is what happens when you lose
a FDE-ed hard drive.  Do you still need to publish the incident and
contact potentially affected individuals?  If the answer is "no", I'm
sure this technology will be quickly adopted, independently of its
actual implementation.

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