FOSS cross-platform data drive encryption

[Gary Little]

They are hard drives. Plug them into any SAS or SATA controller and they will be look like any hard drive, work like any hard drive, and will be recognized by any BIOS or EFI that I know of, until you configure them to enable FDE, which is supported by both T10 and T13 committees. Even as a configured FDE they will appear but require authentication, very likely using a TPM on the CPU motherboard for key and certificate storage.

What do  you mean by "FOSS firmware"? To my knowledge when you hit the power switch on a computer the first thing that starts is what we have called the BIOS for at least 20 years and today includes EFI. That's part of the motherboard and to me really has nothing to do with FOSS, or any kind of free open source software. As far as the hard drive itself, that firmware is written by the manufacturer and typically tailored or even totally re-written for every model of hard drive in their inventory. 

So, given FOSS does not work with a given hard drive, my first thought would be to wonder what's wrong with the FOSS.

Gary Little
H (952) 223-1349
C (952) 454-4629 
gglittle at comcast.net


On Mar 23, 2012, at 2:24 PM, Sam Kuper wrote:

> On 23 March 2012 19:17, Gary Little <gglittle at comcast.net> wrote:
>> My first thought is to go buy an FDE (full disk encryption) hard disk. Both Seagate and Hitachi have them. That is probably the most reliable means of transporting encrypted data across platforms.
> 
> Interesting. Do any of these drives run on FOSS firmware?
> 
> If not, then I'm not sure I'd consider them dependable, at least from
> a security standpoint.
> 
> Sam
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