Posted by: Vacationhouse Date: Friday, February 20, 2009 6:23:56 PM
In reply to: None Post # of 175529
TCG Drive Encryption Goes Mainstream
Posted by Rob Enderle, Feb 20, 2009 05:20 PM
darkreading.com
Recently the TCG, the Trusted Computing Group, released for the management of hard drive encryption which are now being adopted by a number of vendors with Seagate arguably the most prominent. These specificationsspecifications focus on how the drives are managed by host side applications and should provide the dual benefit of increased performance with encrypted drives driving a wider implementation of this security technology. What this enables is vastly lowered barriers to entry for the related products because the standards allow hardware encrypted drives from a wide variety of conforming vendors to be plug compatible.
This has the dual benefit of lowering costs through competitive standardization and increasing adoption of the related technology. The NSA, which participated in this effort, has issued a letter of acceptance for one of the participating vendors indicating that they are behind this effort.
The list of supporting vendors is impressive and includes Fujitsu, Seagate, Toshiba, Hitachi, Wave Systems, CryptoMill, WinMagic, Secude, and McAfee.
Standard Advantages
Advantages to this TCG Hard Drive encryption approach include improved setup time, enhanced scalability, interoperability, increased security over keys, portability, and platform breadth.
Setup Time: With this class of encryption product the data is encrypted from the time the drive is manufactured. Turning on the security is near instant because the drive is already encrypted. With other forms the drive must first become encrypted when the feature is turned on requiring the encryption of the then resident drive contents and this can be very time consuming.
Scalability: For more traditional CPU based solutions, when multiple drives are introduced, they will bottleneck once the capacity of the CPU and chipset is reached. With drive based encryption the restricting function is handled by the drive and scales up in performance with each drive added.
Interoperability: Chipsets vary greatly between processor vendors and have since the late 90s. Processor/Chipset based approaches tend to tie the drives to the chipset and processor solution and have difficulty moving between solutions without performance impact if at all. The TCG approach is plug compatible across vendors virtually eliminating this problem.
Key Security: With CPU/chipset solutions the keys for each hard drive need to be managed by the host side application. They are generally stored in memory so they can be made accessible to the CPU. This leaves the keys vulnerable to kernel level attacks and other like the "Princeton Cold Boot Attack". With the TCG method the keys are sent to the hard drive during the pre-boot typically using a security hardened application making them vastly more difficult to compromise.
Portability: Drives based on the TCG specification can be moved between PCs because, unlike other methods, there is no system level dependency. This is because the encryption engine is inside the drive and not dependent on the unique aspects of any one PC configuration.
RAID Performance: Chipset/CPU configurations are particularly painful on servers or multiple drive desktops because they shift the encryption load to the Processor and chipset which generally is already running at high level load in such a configuration resulting in a potential significant bottleneck.
Wrapping Up:
These new specifications from the TCG and drives from the vendors now supporting them have been needed for some time and address a number of high performance, interoperability, and security concerns. This change represents a significant improvement in an industry, storage, that doesn't have many of them in any given year. |
