Does anyone know of any other methods to securing the data on a solid state drive? Any BIOS level or TPM integrated security?
On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 8:45 AM, Chuck Anderson <c...@wpi.edu> wrote: > On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 07:45:26AM -0400, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > > Incidentally, what *is* the problem with TrueCrypt anyway? It seems to > me, > > a hard drive looks like a hard drive whether it's a HDD or SSD. I would > > expect it to be fine. Do they have any details anywhere, what is the > > problem? > > Sure, an SSD looks the same as an HDD to the application running on > it. But unlike HDDs, SSDs perform (in some cases much) worse and wear > out faster when they are full vs. when they still have empty unused > space. So the ATA TRIM (and SCSI Discard) command was invented as a > way for the application (i.e. filesystem, RAID subsystem, LVM, > encryption subsystem, etc.) to tell the SSD which sectors are free/no > longer in use. In a normal, unencrypted scenario, a disk starts out > mostly empty--the sectors start out zeroed and are only written to > when they are actually needed. In contrast, encrypted disks are > always completely "full" or "untrimmed", because from the time they > are initially formatted and encrypted every sector is written to with > non-zero data because the empty encrypted sectors (i.e. the unused, > zeroed blocks of a filesystem living on top of the encrypted mapping) > appear random once they are encrypted onto the underlying physical > device. > > TrueCrypt and many other full disk encryption packages cannot tell the > drive which sectors are actually free (and hence maintain them as > zeroed sectors on the SSD) because they don't support TRIM. Many of > the packages don't want to support TRIM because it would leak > information about the encrypted disk to a potential attacker. That's > pretty much it in a nutshell. > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss@blu.org > http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss > _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss