Bit9

It is old news that Seagate has built-in encryption directly into the hard drive firmware. In short succession the rest of the industry has followed suit or announced plans for it. This has made digital forensics practitioners screaming in agony ever since, as if it was not hard enough sifting through TBs of data that a typical Enterprise investigation now takes.

Researchers and more importantly intelligence professionals have been playing with cold boot attack mechanism, bringing in a healthy dose of science fiction into what really is a purely digital problem, by spraying DRAM memory chips with a coolant, so that HD encryption keys could be taken out. Here's an interesting report from Bruce Schneier.

More interesting angle to this is to consider the encryption firmware itself. Should we mention that it may be highly proprietary and difficult to reverse? Or not, but how are we to know? Or should we fantasize about some government's hidden backdoors and decryption mechanisms that were forced upon these hardware vendors? Think US Government, if you are on the left, or Chinese or Russian if you are on the right. Last Year Chinese offered to buy Seagate. It caused quite a stir.

We do not have problem with encryption. Protection is a right (should we say your first amendment right?), but we need to be able to certify our encryption solutions and verify their functionality and integrity long after the purchase date. Only in that way, will we be protected and assured of our digital assets. In a more open environment, even forensics solutions will find a way to adopt and use more straight forward ways to acquire the data.