[FDE] CryptoMill's SeaHAWK will support Seagate FDE.2 Momentus

[Allen]

Hi Gang,

I don't wish to be accused of mere persiflage; however, the 
amount of true information in either place is so little that the 
hot air balloon need have no fear of flying high.

On the issue of the Seagate drive, building encryption into 
hardware makes a lot of sense - if it is done right that is - 
because direct attack on FGPAs is a lot harder to achieve than 
hex editing some software code or even a ROM chip. But what is 
not clear at all is what real protection is being offered. It 
seems to me that the weak point is that the front end processes 
still need to be made robust - login for instance, if it is weak 
then does it matter if the disk is encrypted?

Another point to possibly consider is yanking the HD, installing 
it on a test bed where a brute force attack could be automated to 
run round the clock at very high speeds. Give that one can create 
a teraflop cluster for well under $50k, this could be a serious 
issue.

It seems like it is well within the ability of a small 
organization to virtualize the attack by doing something akin to 
forensic level bit copy and mount many copies of the virtual disk 
on a cluster for massive parallel attack, unless, of course, 
there is a mechanism in place to prevent full disk copying. Even 
that won't work very well, I don't believe, because I myself have 
mounted the platters of one HD in the frame of another of the 
similar model in order to copy the data off to analyze, and I'm 
no great shakes at all the hardware hacking. So if the physical 
version has both an encrypted and a non-encrypted variation, the 
physical protection is toast.

The other issue is data recovery when you get hit by a bus. Who 
manages the keys as well as how become the point of attack, not 
the disk encryption itself. This appears to be what we are seeing 
in the evolving HD-DVD fiasco where they have de-soldered the SMD 
to copy and edit the software code on the chip and then re-mount 
it in the device to break the AACS code at a higher level.

Oddly enough this parallels a discussion I was having yesterday 
about our local park and dogs. The core parallel is trust. One 
can either choose sides and duke it out or one can develop a 
community of trust where we work together to achieve our mutual 
needs. While we can not eliminate working on solutions to "Quis 
custodiet ipsos custodes?" we also need to add "Adsertoris cautim 
armorum egonus cunctua? Conductum hominis nostri!"  - "Who will 
protect us all? Only ourselves!"

(My apologies to true Latin scholars. What little I knew has long 
fled. Correct as desired or required by the pain level it brings 
you.)

Best,

Allen

Ali, Saqib wrote:
> CryptoMill will provide a management suite for Seagate's FDE.2 Momentus HDD:
> 
> http://www.cryptomill.com/docs/CMSGPressRelease.pdf
> http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=5085
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