[CentOS] self-encrypting drives

Keith Roberts keith at karsites.net
Sun Sep 23 17:44:57 UTC 2012


On Sun, 23 Sep 2012, Paul Heinlein wrote:

> To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org>
> From: Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] self-encrypting drives
> 
> On Sun, 23 Sep 2012, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
>
>> As the interface for encrypting and locking an SED appears to be the
>> same as for locking a normal drive using the security commands from
>> hdparm should in theory work. This is assuming the BIOS pads
>> passwords that are smaller than 32 bytes the same way as hdparm
>> does, which is with NUL bytes.
>>
>> Hdparm currently only accepts passwords as strings, so if the BIOS
>> uses binary/hex strings for the password it could be problematic to
>> unlock the same drive with hdparm. It should be quite simple to
>> patch hdparm to accept hex strings as passwords though.
>>
>> I have used drive (un)locking with hdparm on USB drives so
>> (un)locking an external SED should be possible.
>
> Interesting. I'd never investigated hdparm as a drive-password
> interface. I'll certainly keep that in mind.

IIRC there might also be a drive unlocking utility on the
Ultimate Boot CD collection?

Kind Regards,

Keith

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