disks with hardware FDE

[Peter Gutmann]

Arshad Noor <arshad.noor at strongauth.com> writes:
>Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>> There are now a number of drives on the market advertising AES based
>> FDE in hardware, and a number of laptops available on the market that
>> claim to support them.
>> [...]
>
>There is a debate going on on that list about the value of
>encrypting data at the disk-drive layer vs. encrypting at the
>application layer - I believe the latter is a more strategic
>solution - and the voices from the Crypto forum would be
>welcome on these issues.

One thing about drive-based encryption is that we're been proised this since 
about 2000 or 2001, and it's always just another year or two away for various 
reasons: standardisation, host controller support, OS support, phase of the 
moon, ... .  The current reason seems to be FIPS 140: the turnaround time for 
a FIPS 140 eval is significantly longer than the mean lifetime of any 
particular hardware/firmware config, and the cost of the constant re-evals 
doesn't help much either.  So drive-based FDE is currently awaiting the 
loading of a compliment of small FIPS 140-soaked paper napkins.  Until then 
there will be a short delay.  Please return to your seats.

Peter.

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