News New SSDs Have Built-in Protection Against Ransomware, Data Theft

CerianK

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The drive has firmware... in addition to normal testing, firmare resistance to focused attack would have to be fully demonstrated, otherwise it is just another bot device (e.g. like some USB flash drives, motherboards, etc., have become).
 

InvalidError

Titan
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The drive has firmware... in addition to normal testing, firmare resistance to focused attack would have to be fully demonstrated
On the privacy side, this drive is just a fancier take on FDE which has been around for 10+ years ago.

I'm guessing the ransomware protection part works by having an underlying media that is 2-3X the usable capacity so the drive can do a block roll-over with history on protected files and the software be used to roll back changes up to however far back the block history goes.
 
If I'm reading this correctly, the drives by themselves don't protect against ransomware, they have to have an app running to detect something fishy going on and then the drive can start doing the compartmentalization.
 

CerianK

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On the privacy side, this drive is just a fancier take on FDE which has been around for 10+ years ago.
That does not say much about protection of the firmware, since the goal of malware isn't always about the data on the drive.
As an example of the potential danger: I wrote an entire remote KVM server for instrumentation (with load balancing, RLL compression, IRQ tail-hooking, UART control, error side-channel, etc.) using assembly language for DOS (client was VB on Windows) years ago... all in less than 1024 bytes. Now I see even more sophisticated remotes (Bomgar, etc.) with billion dollar valuation, and cry that I couldn't market it (as I didn't own the code I wrote).