Apple-tel has been working fine for me.

   --Dean

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 26, 2015, at 9:57 AM, John Orthoefer <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> Basically as long as you use WinTel Hardware you are okay AppleTel hardware 
> doesn’t work.  
> 
> The way it works, in a nutshell is PC BIOS probes the SATA drives.   If the 
> “boot drive” says “Hi, I’m here but locked.”  The BIOS prompts for a 
> password, the password is passed to the drive to unlock and decrypt the Drive 
> Key.  The drive is pretty much set up with some block encryptor (AES-256, I 
> think) just before the write head.   So the drive is always “Encrypted” it’s 
> just if the controller board on the drive has access to the decrypted key. 
> 
> There are Linux utilities for doing things like “regenerating the key”  which 
> causes the disk to be “erased” (the Key Material and the Password used to 
> encrypt the drive are different.)  Yes it doesn’t prevent someone from 
> intercepting the password between the keyboard and the drive (The assumption 
> is the path from the keyboard though the BIOS and out the SATA port are all 
> secure.)   But if that is your worry. you need a better solution than OPAL or 
> even S/W encryption.   
> 
> You also need to make sure the person at least hibernates the machine, at 
> least the Dell systems, if you hibernate, the drive “locks” and the BIOS will 
> reprompt you to unlock the drive to resume.  Better is to power down the 
> machine while it is outside of your control.
> 
> Does that make sense?
> 
> johno
> 
> 
>> On Jan 23, 2015, at 4:34 PM, Daniel Feenberg <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Fri, 23 Jan 2015, John Orthoefer wrote:
>>> 
>>> I’ve been getting OPAL Self encrypting drives.  Since we support so many 
>>> OSes finding a solution that works for everything has been hard.  But OPAL 
>>> on any standard PC hardware should just work.
>> 
>> Can you say something about how the self-encrypted system appears to users? 
>> When do they enter the password? What software asks for the password? Is it 
>> an alternate boot loader? You mention that any standard PC hardware should 
>> work, but sometimes I have seen it said that the BIOS must support 
>> encryption - is that false or an alternative arrangement? How is the 
>> password established? Is there a Windows program that one runs to turn on 
>> encryption and establish the key? Is there a similar Linux program? Can a 
>> drive move from Windows to Linux without losing the data?
>> 
>> The vendor literature is long on the benefits, but short description.
>> 
>> Daniel Feenberg
>> NBER
> 
> _______________________________________________
> bblisa mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa

_______________________________________________
bblisa mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa

Reply via email to