[dm-crypt] Hybrid drives
Heinz Diehl
htd at fancy-poultry.org
Sat Jul 17 09:13:13 CEST 2010
Hi,
I just took a closer look at one of the (new?) hybrid harddisk drives,
such as the Seagate Momentus XT, and now I'm wondering if this
is a top level security problem. If I understand it correctly, the 4 GB
SSD memory on the harddisk operates independendly of the drive itself,
acting as a buffer/cache for virtually all the data stored to the drive. Some
logic in the harddrives controller is going to serve the 4 GB SSD memory
part, which is not available/accessable to the OS.
In other words: such hybrid drives can not safely be encrypted with
LUKS/dmcrypt (or any other WDE software), because the controller
randomly swaps out 4 GB data to the SSD area, and even after shutting
down the machine, parts of/the whole LUKS header/key could possibly
be left on the SSD part?
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX_WyOhTQEw&feature=related )
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