Self-encrypting drives loom as specifications finalised

Angus Kidman
Thursday, 08 January 2009 10:41

Business IT - Technology

The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) will roll out a large number of storage security standards over the next month, as the long-in-development core storage security specification version 1.0 begins to bear fruit and enables mass market self-encrypting drives with a much higher level of security.

Robert Thibadeau, chief technologist for Seagate Technology and a key participant in the TCG storage working group (SWG), said that most of the new standards would debut "hopefully within the next 30 days", including the 1.0 update to the 0.9 draft release which came out in 2008.
"The whole concept behind the SWG specification was to create a real trust in the storage device that the host application could rely on," Thibadeau said at the Storage Visions 2009 industry conference in Las Vegas.

"The SSCs (Security Subsystem Classes) are about individual devices; the core specification is the world out of which you can build those devices," said Thibadeau. "If you ever go and read the core spec, you'll say 'this is too complicated". We knew that; the spec is designed to cover all kinds of different devices and make sure they all operate."

Sub-specifcations derived from the core release are imminent, with the
Enterprise SSC specification "out in a week or two", Thibadeau said. IBM has already shipped a drive based on that spec and Seagate has announced plans to do so. One benefit of the specification is to ability to totally wipe drives in a fraction of a second, Thibadeau added, while separating core drive security from the OS used on a machine .

The Opal SSC for laptops is also due, while the Optical Disk SSC has already been published.
 
Storage Networking Industry Association member Jonathan Thatcher said that discussions between SNIA and TCG on interoperating with the standards would begin at the next meeting of the SNIA SSS Working Group later this month.