Reading really old email, but have new information to add. On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 02:15:38PM +1000, Daniel Carosone wrote:

Speculation: the drive always encrypts the platters with a (fixed) AES key, obviating the need to track which sectors are encrypted or not. Setting the drive password simply changes the key-handling.

Implication: fixed keys may be known and data recoverable from factory records, e.g. for law enforcement, even if this is not provided as an end-user service.

There was an interesting article in 2600 recently about ATA drive security. It's in Volume 26, Number 1 (Spring 2009). Sorry that I don't have an electronic copy. The relevant bit of it is that there are two keys. One key is for the user, and one (IIRC, it is called a master key) is set by the factory. IIRC, there was a court case recently where law enforcement was able to read the contents of a locked disk, contrary to the vendor's claims that nobody, even them, would be able to do so. The man in question had his drives sized by the FBI and they read the drives, uncovering emails between the man and his lawyer. He was suing the manufacturer for false advertising. Here are the links from the 2600 article: http://tinyurl.com/atapwd http://tinyurl.com/cmrrse http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml hdparm -security-erase-enhanced in Linux http://www.deadondemand.com/ http://www.vogon-investigation.com/password-cracker.htm -- Obama Nation | My emails do not have attachments; it's a digital signature that your mail program doesn't understand. | http://www.subspacefield.org/~travis/ If you are a spammer, please email john@subspacefield.org to get blacklisted. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE