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Self-encrypting deception

Formal Metadata

Title
Self-encrypting deception
Subtitle
weaknesses in the encryption of solid state drives (SSDs)
Title of Series
Number of Parts
165
Author
License
CC Attribution 4.0 International:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Publisher
Release Date2018
LanguageEnglish

Content Metadata

Subject Area
Genre
Abstract
We have analyzed the hardware full-disk encryption implementation of several Self-Encrypting Drives (SEDs) from Samsung and Crucial (Micron) by reverse engineering their firmwares. The vendors combined cover a majority of the market share of SEDs sold today. In theory, the security guarantees offered by hardware encryption are similar to those of software implementations. In reality, we found that many hardware implementations have critical security weaknesses, for many models allowing for complete recovery of the data without knowledge of any secret. BitLocker, the encryption software built into Microsoft Windows will rely exclusively on hardware full-disk encryption if the drive advertises supported for it. Thus, for these drives, data protected by BitLocker is also compromised. This challenges the view that full-disk encryption implemented in hardware is preferable over software. We conclude that one should not rely solely on hardware encryption offered by SEDs.
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