From: Heinz Diehl <htd@fancy-poultry.org>
To: dm-crypt@saout.de
Subject: [dm-crypt] Hybrid drives
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2010 09:13:13 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20100717071313.GA7243@fancy-poultry.org> (raw)
Hi,
I just took a closer look at one of the (new?) hybrid harddisk drives,
such as the Seagate Momentus XT, and now I'm wondering if this
is a top level security problem. If I understand it correctly, the 4 GB
SSD memory on the harddisk operates independendly of the drive itself,
acting as a buffer/cache for virtually all the data stored to the drive. Some
logic in the harddrives controller is going to serve the 4 GB SSD memory
part, which is not available/accessable to the OS.
In other words: such hybrid drives can not safely be encrypted with
LUKS/dmcrypt (or any other WDE software), because the controller
randomly swaps out 4 GB data to the SSD area, and even after shutting
down the machine, parts of/the whole LUKS header/key could possibly
be left on the SSD part?
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX_WyOhTQEw&feature=related )
next reply other threads:[~2010-07-17 7:13 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2010-07-17 7:13 Heinz Diehl [this message]
2010-07-17 7:17 ` [dm-crypt] Hybrid drives Heinz Diehl
2010-07-17 7:58 ` Luca Berra
2010-07-17 9:46 ` Heinz Diehl
2010-07-17 11:05 ` Mikko Rauhala
2010-07-17 11:45 ` Heinz Diehl
2010-07-17 13:27 ` Sven Eschenberg
2010-07-17 11:10 ` Christoph Anton Mitterer
2010-07-17 10:57 ` Christoph Anton Mitterer
2010-07-18 17:01 ` Arno Wagner
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