Self-encrypting Self-deleting Drives
Posted by Ken Y-N on August 17th, 2010 at 04:07pm
Toshiba have come out with an interesting concept, the self-deleting drive. Basically, a disk compliant with the Trusted Computing Group’s Opal full disk encryption standard can be erased instantly by just deleting the key, so what Toshiba has done is to allow the host device administrator to configure when the drive should be erased, such as at power off or when the drive is removed.
My initial thought is that this sounds pretty useless, but there’s many use cases. An obvious one is for thin clients, where after someone finishes a session all trace of the user needs to be wiped. A second use case is one I read about recently where used photocopiers from eBay were found to have documents left on the hard drive drive that is present inside many modern copying devices.
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