Stephen’s World

Interesting Hardware

It seems seagate have announced an interesting addition to their Hard Disk line, a 2.5 inch hard disk with built in Triple DES encryption at a platter level. However the key for the encrypted contents is stored on an area of the disk platter which according to Seagate no one can access, tho it would make life easier for data recovery people it may make it a target for the hacker types to see if they can recover it.

Something that would be more sensible would be the inclusion of a security chip on the controller that has the keys and which the user has to authenticate to in order to enable the proper decryption of information on the disk. If you get the key wrong, personally I wouldn’t tell you and just spew random data at the disk user, not the contents of the disk..

Have a look at the press release here and the product specs here. The word is they are planning a follow on product too that makes use of the AES algorithm too, instead of the quite dated Triple DES algorithm.