[Discuss] CipherShed: TrueCrypt fork

[Richard Pieri]

On 10/1/2014 11:19 AM, Bill Bogstad wrote:
> Because you trust the firmware provided by the disk drive manufacturer?   You
> clearly aren't wearing your tin foil hat today.

The encryption in SEDs is good enough to keep someone who swipes a
notebook from getting at the data on it. They're strong against cold
boot attacks: MEKs (media encryption keys) aren't stored in system RAM;
they're encrypted and stored in the disk hardware itself. They're strong
against evil maid attacks: KEK (key encryption key) entry happens in the
system firmware and with properly signed EFI it is more difficult to
compromise the firmware than it is to compromise the boot loader. They
are entirely OS agnostic and encryption incurs no performance penalties.

There is a clever SED attack: hotplug. If you disconnect the SATA data
cable without disconnecting power then you can plug the drive into a
different host and the data will be readable. This is easily foiled
simply by turning off the computer when physical security is low.

In short, SEDs do everything that software encryption can do, they do it
faster, and they do it better.

-- 
Rich P.