On Fri, 22 Dec 2000, Brian Lane wrote:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15620.html
Stealth plan puts copy protection into every hard drive
But because the system makes use of the physical location on the device of the encrypted item, software designed for non-compliant drives will break in some circumstance when encrypted data files are moved.
"It requires both drives to be compliant when data is to move from one disk to another," says Lotspiech. "And a compliant application to get all that data to the new drive".
So a hard drive containing small individual containing non-copyable files of say, Gartner reports, will essentially be unrestorable using existing backup programs.
Maybe I'm being dense today, but I don't see how this is going to work. So they have a key on your drive, they encrypt the data using this key, but at some point the data has to be decrypted and used, which means that it can be intercepted.
The article isn't too clear, but it appears that a 'compliant application' is going to be needed to do the encrypt/decrypt? All software is subject to disassembly, so there is no real protection there.
Here's one other thing; how does the "compliant application" get the decryption keys?? If I can't copy files without being hooked up to the net, then half my computers at home will quit working! (I have two distinct networks: one for secure data and one with internet access...). If the compliant application needs to hook up to the internet in order to get a decryption key to read data, these drives will not work for a host of legitimate non-networked applications. On the other hand if the compliant application does NOT need to hook up to the internet to get keys, then someone with a debugger will have a utility to get your drive's whole list of keys (and a patched BIOS to make it behave like a regular drive) within a couple weeks of their introduction to the market. Unless it comes out at the same time as "encrypted instruction set" computing, where the executables are decrypted inside the CPU... Bear