Self-Wiping Hard Drives From Toshiba 268
Orome1 writes "Toshiba announced a family of self-encrypting hard disk drives engineered to automatically invalidate protected data when connected to an unknown host. Data invalidation attributes can be set for multiple data ranges, enabling targeted data in the drive to be rendered indecipherable by command, on power cycle, or on host authentication error."
Enhanced Harddrive (Score:2, Interesting)
This one is way cooler.
It actually releases acid into the hard-drive platters:
http://www.deadondemand.com/products/enhancedhdd
If they've implemented this properly then you could send a remote command wirelessly that would wipe the hard-drive.
I'm pretty sure this is a forensic investigators nightmare...
Re:Law enforcement... (Score:4, Interesting)
Confiscate the computer with a self-encrypting HDD. Boot a live CD, image the HDD. Analyse the image.
Or am I missing the point?
For storage in certain devices... (Score:5, Interesting)
More info (Score:5, Interesting)
What a ... blog. Yeah. Just go to toshiba.com and read the press release from the source, instead of the cut and pasted partial version at the ... blog:
http://sdd.toshiba.com/techdocs/MKxx61GSYG_release.pdf [toshiba.com]
They claim it uses AES256.. How do you know its not some kind of simple XOR? Probably their exotic "crypto erasure scheme" which they don't discuss is simply deleting the AES256 key. Where would you store the key? How about in the partition table? How long until there's a patch to linux fdisk to read the key, or at least not overwrite it when partitioning, and then how long until someone uses a loopback crypto file system support until linux to read a drive assuming you previously know the AES256 key?
Also, those drives are small. The last time I bought a 160 GB drive was in the mid 00s. Wouldn't it be hilarious if the low capacity was because everything is stored twice, once "encrypted" for the (l)user and once unencrypted for government special access "only"?
This is just all speculation on top of speculation, yet it all seems strangely likely.