* Preventing data leaks with encryption
Most of the current furor over leaks of proprietary data has centered on cases of lost or misplaced laptops or backup tapes. A few years ago, with less mainstream media attention, there was a similar round of stories about data leaks. Most of them centered on careless end-of-life management for desktops and servers.
IT shops had scrapped systems, sent them to recyclers, or returned them to leasing companies, all without properly scrubbing the hard drives. Many people found out then how little “format c:” or the equivalent did to protect confidential data. Even following it up with three complete disk overwrites, although much better, was not a sure thing.
At my site, we went to an increased number of overwrites, sometimes paid the leasing company to do a scrub as well, and my data center manager friend began to call on the services of his “Decommissioner” (a 10-pound sledge) at times. It fell short of thermite for achieving the true-delete, of course, but was easier and cheaper to use. [Ed: Here’s how the military is looking at doing it.]
If you truly want secure data on disk, one approach is to encrypt it. This can be accomplished in software (as with PGP products), or in hardware. Seagate is now selling 2.5-inch hard drives with built-in AES encryption of all data written to disk. Seagate has even partnered with Wave Systems and Secude for password-management software that makes the platform useful in an enterprise setting (i.e. by allowing for password backup and transfer compliant with the Trusted Platform Management standard).
Broad commercial availability of such technologies, especially for the critical laptop market, will be a huge boon in any compliance-sensitive or just generally security-conscious environment. The “Whoops, where’s my laptop?” leaks should begin to fade from memory.
Using encrypted disks could hugely improve the secure decommissioning of data center systems, too. After all, an encrypted disk becomes a disk full of garbage as soon as the encryption key is changed. It can then be treated like an unencrypted disk and repeatedly wiped as well, of course.
But even if Seagate were shipping the same capabilities in any of its enterprise storage lines, are such drives ready to use in your data center? No. However, it might be just as accurate to say our data centers are not ready to use such drives.
The key problem from the technology side is the layers of management and abstraction built atop actual disk drives. Where should the awareness of disk-level security stop?
It would make sense to have that awareness go no higher than the level of a RAID array, since that is the highest level of equipment normally paying attention to actual drives. RAID arrays would also have to participate in the identity management and key management architectures within the enterprise – interacting with levels of enterprise middleware they do not normally have to take notice of.
On the flipside of the equation, most enterprises still don’t run a key management infrastructure at all, and those that do mostly associate keys with users or corporate entities, not devices or systems. Are their PKI systems and associated processes ready to deal with transactions at RAID-fail-over speeds? If a data store needs to move from array to array, and possibly from data center to data center, could the system handle that?
So, this kind of encrypted disk is not ready for the data center, nor is the data center ready for such disks. Only time and steady demand will make them ready, as the required accommodations creep into the critical levels of the infrastructure. This looks inevitable, but it may not be very fast.
