Last month, I wrote about a disk encryption vulnerability in "Keep Your Encrypted Data Encrypted." This month, more disk encryption news—of a more positive sort. Seagate Technology will soon announce what it calls a self-encrypting full-disk encryption (FDE) hard drive for the data center. Seagate says its self-encrypting disks are not vulnerable to the cold-boot vulnerability because the encryption key isn't stored in memory—it's stored on the disk itself.
Seagate has made a string of announcements about its line of self-encrypting disks over the last year. In July 2007, Seagate said that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) had certified the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption chip built into Seagate’s Momentus 5400 FDE.2 disc drive, which Seagate described as "the world’s first laptop hard drive with native encryption." In January 2008, the company announced Maxtor BlackArmor, a 160GB USB 2.0–attached portable storage device that uses the same built-in encryption. In October 2007, Seagate, with partners LSI and IBM, announced that it would extend its hardware-based FDE technology to its enterprise-class hard drives, with "plans to deliver ... to customers in 2008." . . .
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