New Toshiba Drives Wipe Data When Turned Off

CWmike writes "Toshiba on Tuesday introduced a new hard drive feature that can wipe out data after the storage devices are powered down. The Wipe feature in Toshiba's SED (Self-Encrypting Drives) will allow for deletion of secure data prior to disposing or re-purposing hard drives, Toshiba said. The technology invalidates a hard-drive security key when a system's power supply is turned off. The new Wipe capability will go into future versions of the SED drives, for which no timeframe was given. Beyond use in PCs, Toshiba wants to put this feature on storage devices in copiers and printers."

Murphy's Law

[SilverHatHacker]

Sounds like a good idea, but I'm almost positive there will be instances where important data is going to be screwed with by mistake. I personally would rather not have my hard drive erasing my data without my express approval, but I'm not the average Joe.

My kingdom for a UPS

[king_grumpy]

In other news today, a company under investigation by authorities claimed all the data was wiped from their servers following an unexpected power outage.

Re:I find this hard to believe

[Andorin]

Is it really? Perhaps I can get some education here. *nix systems come with a tool called shred [wikimedia.org], which overwrites a file multiple times with random data to provide secure deletion. We also have tools like dban [dban.org], which will do basically the same thing to the whole drive. How securely do tools like these erase data?

Re:Congratulations...

[IICV]

Not necessarily - you can still read the contents of RAM relatively accurately for up to ten minutes [freedom-to-tinker.com] after the power goes out as long as you're quick about extracting the sticks and applying some cryogenics (a spray from an upside-down can of compressed air works pretty well). Presumably, when they sense that the power is cut these hard drives convert the momentum in the spinning disks into enough electricity to zero out the onboard encryption key, which would take moments and render the contents unrecoverable.

Re:Congratulations...

[Kymermosst]

Presumably, when they sense that the power is cut these hard drives convert the momentum in the spinning disks into enough electricity to zero out the onboard encryption key, which would take moments and render the contents unrecoverable.

The KISS principle suggests that they would use a capacitor.

Not deleted, encrypted

[joe_cot]

From the scant details in the article and summary, it appears that the drives are encrypted, and the "wipe" consists of getting rid of the encryption key.

Calling that a "wipe" is rather misleading in my opinion. Toshiba's in for one hell of a liability issue if their encryption is ever cracked -- though I'm sure they'll take care of all that in the fine print.

Re:I find this hard to believe

[Andorin]

Can you elaborate on how shred is defeated by any file system besides ext2? For example, does it not function properly on other file systems?

How can they guarantee security?

[xtal]

This is a good step forward for general security.

How could you trust this 100%? Without the firmware (and some way to verify it), this likely could / does contain backdoors.

For the children, you see.

I don't see a major improvement over well set up truecrypt partitions.

Re:Lots of uses for this technology...

[fluffy99]

I recall a story about so-called AES encrypted thumb drives. While the hardware symmetric key was encrypted with AES, the actual 'encryption' of the data stored in the memory itself was nothing more the XORing the data with the secret key. Not terribly secure. Is this Toshiba drive actually doing any sort of decent encryption that losing the key is significant?

What makes this any more secure than Bitlocker or other similar whole drive/partition encryption with a passphrase?