Vanguard wrote:
> "Barry Watzman" <WatzmanNOSPAM@neo.rr.com> wrote in message
> news:45c4b406$0$9009$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
>> Re: "The other half of the hash (to decode) was back in the original
>> laptop. Preventing someone from getting at it, especially by stealing
>> the drive, is just what that security is for; i.e., unless the drive
>> is in the original laptop that hashed up the drive's contents AND you
>> know the password, you will never get at the decoded contents of the
>> drive."
>>
>> I don't think that's correct. This isn't windows,
>
> I don't care what OS is on the drive, encrypted or not. The whole-disk
> encryption is performed in hardware. Half of that support is on the
> hard drive, the other half is back in the mobo. If the drive wanders
> off from the mobo that hashed up the drive, that drive cannot be
> decoded. It is very similar to e-mail encryption: the source (owner of
> the certificate or the mobo) has the "private" portion and the target
> (recipient or hard drive) has the "public" portion. Without both,
> there's no decryption, and the source controls that.
>
>> this is an IDE
>
> Yep, as I said, this hardware encryption was first provided in ATA-3
> specification. It is NOT solely implemented on the hard drive alone.
> Unfortunately it costs to get copies of the ATA specs from
> http://www.t13.org/ and I really don't need them.
>
>> Otherwise, as has happened here, if the computer motherboard dies,
>> then the drive is lost, and that is beyond secure, it is "data
>> endangering".
>
> Yep, that is what happens. And that is why you MUST do data backups
> since they won't depend on the private key for the encryption that the
> mobo has. The backups can either be open in that anyone could restore
> from them or you would password-protect them, but that password
> protection is entirely within the backup file so you could use another
> computer running the same backup program to restore your data because
> the password was only used to encode the file (i.e., there is no
> separation of private and public keys, there is just the one key used to
> encode the file).
>
I am curious to know what the final word is on that issue. Until reading
your post, I shared Barry's opinion. If you are correct, and you seem to
know your stuff, then I would look twice before passwording a hard-drive.

Regards

--
John Doue