Keep Your Data Safe With Self-Encrypting Hard Drives

The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has provided hard-drive manufactures and vendors with three new encryption standards. To date almost all the major hard-drive manufacturers have stated their intentions to adopt the new standards. Self-encrypted hard-drives are already available and vendors such as Seagate and Hitachi have already taken the first steps in an effort to better protect stored data.

The nonprofit organization TCG, has been developing open vendor-neutral standards for a while now, but considers its Opal standards to be the blueprint for all levels of data protection as well as the manufacturing of self-encrypting hard drives. The TCG predicts that in a few years self-encrypting drives will be utilized in different enterprises world wide. Looking at the new data protection laws being enforced in different states and countries TCG's predictions might just come true as businesses continue searching for the most convenient way to protect data and avoid hefty fines and even lawsuits.

The following points are the three new specifications introduced by TCG:

• The Opal specification: These outline the minimum requirements for storage devices utilized on computers and laptops.

• The Enterprise Security Subsystem Class Specification: This concentrates on drives in data centers and high-volume applications.

• The Storage Interface Interactions Specification: This gives details on how other standards for storage interfaces and connections in addition to how the TCG's existing Storage Core Specification (including other specifications) interact with each other.

TCG’s approach to Trusted Storage provides manufacturers and users with an easy and understandable method of fully encrypting data in hardware in order to ensure the safety of the data regardless of what happens to the drive. According to the chairman of the TCG, Robert Thibadeau "When a USB drive is unplugged, or when a laptop is powered down, or when an administrator pulls a drive from a server, it can't be brought back up and read without first giving a cryptographically-strong password. If you don't have that, it's a brick. You can't even sell it on eBay".

Research by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse revealed that from January 2005, an estimate of 251,154,519 records were lost or stolen in the United States alone. The number of data breaches taking place each year are definitely on the rise but at least cautious user behavior has brought down criminal profits. Other Manufactures supporting the new encryption standards include: Western Digital, Toshiba, Fujitsu and Samsung.