ShareThisBy TOM ABATE
Monday, October 30, 2006
Lost a laptop loaded with sensitive files? In a few months it may not be such a big deal.
Seagate Technology is poised to deliver the world's first laptop hard disk drive with built-in encryption, or data-scrambling, capabilities.
Industry analysts said the new drives, which are scheduled to hit the market in the first quarter of 2007, will offer an easier way for companies, government agencies and individuals to secure laptops against the sort of embarrassing losses or thefts that have put personal data at risk.
The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit consumer organization based in San Diego, recently tallied the potential damage from the rash of reports involving lost or stolen laptops and found that more than 93 million private records have been placed at possible risk.
The biggest such flub came earlier this year, when the Department of Veterans Affairs said a laptop containing the records of 28 million Americans had been stolen from the home of an agency employee.
"That incident could have been resolved without public disclosure had they used an encrypted drive on that laptop," said Scott Shimomura, senior product marketing manager for Seagate.
Encryption is hardly new. Charles Kolodgy, research director of security products for IDC in Massachusetts, noted that software has long been available to scramble the full contents of a hard drive.
But software encryption programs, such as PGP Disk, are a minuscule market. Kolodgy estimated that encryption software and tools are worth about $200 million annually _ a figure dwarfed by the $12 billion spent in 2005 for antivirus, spyware, spam filters, firewalls and related software in the security category.
The problem with software-based hard drive encryption, Kolodgy said, is that users have to make a conscious effort to add, use and manage the programs. That's why he and other security analysts say Seagate's encrypted hard drive could be a big deal.
"This has got tremendous potential application," said John Donovan, a vice president with the Los Altos disk drive market research firm TrendFOCUS.
Donovan said weaving encryption into the fabric of the hard drive will make it something users can take for granted.
Other drivemakers are working on similar approaches to built-in encryption but, Donovan said, "there's no question Seagate is way out in front on this."
Shimomura, the Seagate product manager, explained how the new system will work.
The heart of the new hardware-based system is a special chip. That chip, built into the drive, will serve to encode and decode all data traveling to or from the disk, he said.
This encrypted drive will be installed in the laptop by the manufacturer. Once the user takes possession of the machine, the user or a system administrator will have to create a password in order to use the computer.
"You cannot boot up your system until you have loaded the password that unlocks the encryption," Shimomura said.
Don't lose or forget the password because Seagate says there are no back doors or hidden tricks to decrypt the data unless the proper password is entered.
"If the password has been lost to the drive, then, yes, the drive becomes unusable," Shimomura said.
Nate Lawson is an encryption expert with Cryptography Research, a San Francisco company that designs and evaluates security systems.
As Lawson explained, encryption systems, whether hardware-enabled like the Seagate drive or software-driven like the various programs that have been on the market for years, are a lot more secure than using the password built into the Windows operating system of the PC itself.
Such system passwords are easy for experienced technologists to get around, Lawson said, and if the hard drive is removed and put into another PC, it can be read.
Encrypting the hard drive, whether in hardware or software, would prevent a thief from turning on the PC or even accessing the data by removing the drive and placing it into another machine, Lawson said.
E-mail Tom Abate at tabate(at)sfchronicle.com.
