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PC Magazine:'Trusted Storage' Spec Will Encrypt Hard Drives
02.13.06 Total posts: 1


PC Magazine...
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1926415,00.asp

By Mark Hachman
The Trusted Computing Group has laid out a preliminary framework for "trusted storage," a hard drive that would use encryption as a means of protecting data.
The TCG released the Trusted Software Stack version 1.2 on Monday, with features that include direct anonymous attestation, among others. But it is the trusted hard drive specification, due in preliminary form at the end of March, which should interest consumers and IT managers alike.


At the RSA Conference this week in San Jose, Seagate said it was showing off a prototype hard drive fully encrypted using some of the early work in trusted storage. A final specification could be in place by June, according to Michael Willett, senior director at Seagate Research, part of hard-drive maker Seagate Technology.

"The work's been going on for a couple of years now," Willett said in an interview. "We're shooting for the end of March, possibly early April for an internal spec. It's all of the hard drive companies, the flash people – all the technical guys are involved. We're here today to let the rest of the world know what we're doing."

Preventing unauthorized applications to write data to the drive could help prevent worms and other viruses, which in the trusted model would need to explicitly authorize applications to write data to a trusted storage unit.


A "trusted" platform is defined by what is known as the "root of trust" – which, inside a PC or a server, will likely be a Trusted Platform Module. TPMs were first architected by the TCG, which Microsoft helped form in 2003 in its bid to architect its Palladium digital-rights-management initiative, later referred to as the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base and later Trusted Computing. Microsoft's latest "trusted" disclosure has been to reveal that untrusted drivers will be blocked by Vista, its upcoming operating system.

A TPM, such as that found within Lenovo's latest ThinkPad notebooks, is a small microcontroller that stores the keys needed to unencrypt data. When the user authenticates himself via a password, smart card, biometric reader or some combination of the three, the TPM authorizes the decryption and use of data or applications that have been previously encrypted.

To allow access to the data, the TPM will need to interact with a trusted storage device, which can either be a flash card or traditional hard drive, either by itself or organized within a RAID array. In either case, the root of trust is either the server or PC in which the storage controller chip is housed, Willett said.

Within the hard drive, a trusted – and hidden – partition will store the keys and tables defining what rights the user or the host platform has to access the data. The drive itself does not have to be encrypted, but it can be.

The data is not stored within the disk's file structure itself, however, but in the memory and logic mounted on the drive's controller board. Normally, this memory would be used solely for the monitoring and storage of the locations of drive sectors and other management functions, Willett said.

"This is a whole powerful computing microcosm by itself," Willett said.

How it works

The trusted storage framework itself covers six scenarios: the "enrollment" process, where a trusted drive is connected to a host and the two devices negotiate; locking and encrypting that device; authorizing a storage device feature set to host application for trusted use; logging data transactions for forensic purposes; securely downloading firmware updates; and a more generic framework for securely storing the data itself.

Before a drive was attached to the system, it must be "enrolled," or provided with an offline method of identifying itself to the system, Willett said, which is stored on the drive itself. The drive is then connected, and the two devices identify themselves to one another and verify their electronic identity. Within the PC environment, the storage device could be managed so that multiple users could store information on the drive, each prevented from accessing the other's data.

In the case a drive was lost, a user or IT manager would destroy the key on the host PC, effectively preventing access to data.

"Seen from a value perspective, it brings a lot of value to connected storage or other RAID-array type of environments," said Brian Berger, executive vice president of marketing and sales at Wave Systems, whose EMBASSY suite of middleware and applications is based on the TCG where Berger serves as marketing chairman. "Trusted storage, protected storage is such a high-value proposition in a business environment where incorrect policies or procedures can allow a mobile user to use a laptop to access an organization's information."

TCG members expect the T13 technical group overseeing the ATA storage standard to approve the storage framework when it meets next week. The T10 group overseeing SCSI has already approved the framework, Willett said.

Specifically, the two groups will vote on a "trust and receive" command interface or container, which will be "injected" with a data payload fed from the TPM, Willett said. The framework allows other commands to be inserted, allowing an extended command set of security and trust functions, he said.

The TCG does not define what policies can be applied to the trusted storage device, save one: the policies must be disclosed to the user, which must choose or "opt-in" to use them, Berger said.

When asked to speculate whether an OS or content provider could require a user to opt in to a protected data store to prevent the third-party copyrighted data from being copied without permission, Berger demurred.

"It's an interesting use model, delivering content in a protected way where the content owner or the application owner distributes that content or wares using strong authentication, if they're not giving it away for free," Berger said.

The TCG also announced version 1.2 of its Trusted Software Stack, which adds support for direct anonymous attestation, the ability to run and generate a new Attestation Identity Key, and other features. The TCG also said that it would begin demonstrating "Trusted Network Connect," an endpoint integrity verification method that uses the TPM to determine whether an endpoint PC or server should be connected to the network, as per rules defined by the network administrator.