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
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=20100717071313.GA7243@fancy-poultry.org \
--to=htd@fancy-poultry.org \
--cc=dm-crypt@saout.de \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox