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From: "Ralf-P. Weinmann"
ABIT has come out with a new motherboard, the "IC7-MAX3" featuring something called 'Secure IDE', which seems to involve HW crypto in the onboard IDE controller:
From the marketing fluff at http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/news1.jsp?pDOCNO=en_0307251
"For MAX3, the ABIT Engineers listened to users who were asking for information security. SecureIDE connects to your IDE hard disk and has a special decoder; without a special key, your hard disk cannot be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and would be information thieves cannot access your hard disk, even if they remove it from your PC. Protect your privacy and keep anyone from snooping into your information. Lock down your hard disk, not with a password, but with encryption. A password can be cracked by software in a few hours. ABIT's SecureIDE will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files."
No, I have no idea what this actually means either. I'm trying to find out.
Peter Trei
Yeah, that announcement just ran over the slashdot ticker. Someone posted the
following insightful link subsequently:
ftp://ftp.abit.com.tw/pub/download/fae/secureide_eng_v100.pdf
Looks like that sucker only does key-truncated version of DES called DES-40.
Right... did they say weeks? I'd say minutes, unless ABIT means [insert some
impoverished 3rd world country] government supercomputers.
It's snakeoil, move on, nothing to see here.
Cheers,
Ralf
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Ralf-P. Weinmann