Seagate Ships Super-Secure Hard Disk Drive

Mar 13, 2007 

Two years after 
first being announced 
by Seagate, the world's most secure hard drive is finally to go on sale in a 
laptop from system vendor ASI Computer Technologies. 

The ground-breaking 2.5 inch Momentus 5400 FDE.2 (full disk encryption) has had 
a long and winding gestation, but is now set to be put on sale at the end
of March in a real laptop, ASI's C8015+, costing $2,150. 

As well as on-the-fly encryption integrated into the drive itself using chip 
acceleration, the laptop also features a trusted platform module (TPM), and
fingerprint reader, security add-ons that have added roughly 20 percent to the 
cost of what is otherwise a mainstream Intel Core 2 Duo laptop. 

The drive to ship in the ASI machine will be the 80GB version, but 100GB, 120GB 
and 160GB versions are waiting in the wings, all based on a 3Gb/sec SATA
interface and spinning at 5400 RPM. 

The main cleverness of the Momentus FDE.2 lies in the way the drive reads and 
writes have been tightly entwined with 128-bit AES-based encryption right
down to DriveTrust firmware level. The user has the power to set a password to 
access the drive during system boot, but is otherwise unaware that all data
at rest is being encrypted and unencrypted transparently. Data is never in 
clear text except when it is being used by an application. 

Putting encryption into a hard drive is no mere security window-dressing. 
According to Seagate, any U.S. company that loses a laptop using the Seagate 
drive
in conjunction with the launch security management system from Wave Systems, 
will not have to give public notification of the loss, even if the data is
of a highly confidential nature. This alone guarantees that the technology will 
find a market given the increasingly costly and embarrassing repercussions
of laptop thefts. 

Seagate claims the performance hit for what is usually a CPU-intensive process 
is only a couple of percent thanks to onboard processing, and that the user
would not be aware of any read or write drag. 

The Wave Systems management software -- used standalone or in conjunction with 
a management server -- can access other admin-pleasing features that have
been included in the design. If a user forgets his or her password, a master 
password can be applied to give access to the drive as a last resort. It also
comes with pre-boot authentication, which restricts access to the drive during 
boot-up, fully hashed passwords, and a crypto-erase feature which wipes
the drive for re-use or disposal. 

The drives themselves can be managed in a structured way by setting security 
policies, adding and deleting user accounts, enabling remote management, and
carrying out conformance checking and logging. 

"It is longer than five years that we've known that security in storage was 
going to be necessary," said Seagate's notebook marketing manager, Joni Clark.
"This product has been in development for two years and the technology for five 
years or more," she said. 

The company has drip-released details of the drive over a long period, 
presumably to prepare the market for what is a radical concept that looks 
certain
to make its way into all drives sooner or later. But Seagate trod carefully in 
its roll-out, concerned that full disk encryption might be seen as overkill.
The company even developed a version 1 FDE drive last year as a concept product 
to prove the technology could be made to work without introducing expensive
and unwieldy management hassle. Large organizations may use Ethernet to connect 
remote offices with Verizon Business' roll out of a nationwide WAN service.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129734-pg,1/article.html

Vikas Kapoor,
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