Seagate Technology, American manufacturer of hard drives, today announce the Momentus 5400 FDE.2, the strongest encrypting 2.5 inch laptop PC hard drive in the world. The most exciting benefit of the Momentus is the ability to encrypt your entire hard drive without taking a toll on your processor like many software-based encryption alternatives.

The Momentus ships with a comprehensive suite of powerful security capabilities, and offers the award winning perpendicular recording technology for a total of 160GB of storage, a super-fast Serial ATA interface, and a hardware-based AES encryption.

The hardware-based encryption offers superior advantages over software encryption methods. All the encryption processing is performed entirely within the drive itself, leaving your CPU to focus on more important tasks. The AES encryption is a government-grade security protocol used to encrypt all information on your hard drive on lost or stolen laptops.

ASI Computer Technologies, a leading provider of laptop PCs, will be the first to offered the drive in their new ASI C8015 whitebook systems shipping next month. In addition, the ASI C8015 will feature a biometric fingerprint reader for additional security. ASI’s laptop is mainly targeted at healthcare, legal, finance, and government industries; and they surely do need them. These days, it’s not uncommon to hear about a government  or business employee who had a laptop lost or stolen which contained extremely vital information.

“Computer security is a growing concern for all of our channel customers, though fear of stolen laptops is especially acute,” said Kent Tibbils ASI senior director of Platform Technologies and Marketing. “And for good reason: the theft of intellectual property, customer information and other precious content stored on laptops can cost organizations dearly in legal remedies and customer retention, to say nothing of the considerable cost of restoring one’s good name. Seagate’s Momentus 5400
FDE.2 hard drive with the Wave Systems management software allows ASI to deliver notebooks with the strongest, easiest to deploy security available.”

A recent study by the Ponemon Institute found that lost or stolen laptops make up 35% of all compromised computer data, and 69% of those who do not encrypt sensitive or confidentail material on notebooks were most concerned about system performance; Seagate’s Momentus directly offers an affordable solution.

The only successful attempt at deciphering AES encryption has been done bye using a side channel attack; which is a type of attack that does not break the algorithm itself, but rely’s on external evidence such as timing information, power consumption, electromagnetic leaks, and sound. While the encryption is not 100%, it’s close enough; and would most likely require a government official using extremely expensive equipment to crack. That is to say it could even be done.

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Entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 5:12 am under Security, Technology.

Read more entries by George Gardner.
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