Ed Felten Defeats Hard Drive Encryption

from the ed-felten-strikes-again dept

Ed Felten, and the various grad students who work for him at Princeton, have done plenty to contribute to the computer security field (and make quite a name for themselves), from breaking the old SDMI encryption that the recording industry insisted was unbeatable (which nearly got Felten sued) to showing just how vulnerable e-voting machines are. However, he may have just broken his biggest story yet. Felten and a group of colleagues have now shown that hard disk encryption is incredibly easy to beat. This should be a huge concern, considering how many people and organizations rely on data encryption to protect important data. In fact, with many of the "lost" hard drive stories over the past few years, many organizations have insisted the risk was minimal, since the data was all encrypted. Yet, as Felten's team shows in this video below, not only is it quite easy to defeat the encryption using a simple can of compressed air, in some cases, there isn't much that can be done to protect against this. As the video notes, this won't work on some systems if the computer is turned completely off and the encryption package opens up before the operating system boots -- but otherwise, most systems are vulnerable. Basically, they've figured out that, despite what many believe, data held in RAM does not disappear immediately when the power is cut. And, if you freeze the chip, you can make the data last a very long time. This is important, because for disk encryption, the key to unlocking the data resides in the RAM. If someone can access that key in the RAM and make a copy of it, then they can unencrypt all of the data without knowing your password.

Filed Under: ed felten, encryption, hard drives, security

Seagate Hard Drives Came With Trojan Pre-Installed

from the no-extra-charge,-either dept

There have been plenty of stories this year about problems with Chinese manufacturing outlets, though, not many of them have touched on the technology industry. Now, however, Seagate is admitting that some of its hard drives that were made in China came with a trojan horse password sniffer pre-installed. It mostly targeted Chinese online games, but the one American game it included was the ever-popular World of Warcraft. On the plus side, the trojan also disables any other password stealing keyloggers that it finds. Seagate is now offering free copies of anti-virus software to customers impacted by this. In the meantime, experts suggest that you might want to format any new hard drives you get, just to be safe.

Filed Under: hard drives, trojans, world of warcraft
Companies: seagate