When will similar encryption capability be available in flash and solid state devices?
Sanvido, Cassuto, and Guyot: Multiple flash and SSD vendors already provide self-encrypting flash and SSD products, but most of these solutions are proprietary and require specialized software to manage the security of the device. Now that the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Storage Work Group Core Architecture Specification has been published and multiple software vendors are supporting it in their products, the number of flash and SSD products implementing the TCG specification is expected to increase, and the proprietary solutions will likely only be used for niche markets. We know of at least one vendor that is shipping SSDs based on the TCG specifications. Let’s start with the basics of self-encrypting drives. What is different in these drives and how do they work? Self-encrypting drives encrypt every single sector on-the-fly and store the encrypted sector on the storage media. The key used to encrypt/decrypt is a secret known only by the drive and is securely stored inside the driv
