Re: disks with hardware FDE

[Arshad Noor <arshad.noor@strongauth.com>]

Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> There are now a number of drives on the market advertising AES based
> FDE in hardware, and a number of laptops available on the market that
> claim to support them.
> 
> Has anyone had any real-world experience with these yet? Are there
> standards for how they get the keys from the BIOS or OS? (I'm
> interested in how they deal with zeroization on sleep and such.)
> Lastly, anyone have any idea of whether the manufacturers are doing
> the encryption correctly or not?
> 

Perry,

I have copied the IEEE 1619.3 Working Group where disk-drive
manufacturers are working on some of these KM issues.

There is a debate going on on that list about the value of
encrypting data at the disk-drive layer vs. encrypting at the
application layer - I believe the latter is a more strategic
solution - and the voices from the Crypto forum would be
welcome on these issues.

I will let the FDE vendors respond to you so you can forward
as appropriate.  Thanks.

Arshad Noor
StrongAuth, Inc.