SSDs self encryption is compromised

Privacy
1

Self-Encrypting Deception: Weaknesses in the Encryption of Solid State Drives

image
image752Ă—628 91.1 KB

2 Likes
2

That’s a mess, Samsung can’t even consistently protect against basic ATA attacks or ensure safe wear leveling, the fact that the best you can get here is “probably safe” on one out of nine drives is a joke

If your drive can’t properly randomize the DEK upon sanitize commands or if it’s reusing a single key across the entire disk, you might as well hand over your data to anyone remotely interested

2 Likes
3

No surprise Samsung failed at encryption. It was Samsung that shipped 100 million phones with broken encryption.

4 Likes
4

This is five years old to be clear.

OPAL has improved a lot from what I understand.

And cryptsetup supports layering both hw+sw encryption in the latest version: https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/cryptsetup/v2.7/v2.7.0-ReleaseNotes

6 Likes
5

Hi! thanks for the great news!
I’m currently using sedutil DTA boot, to unlock the disk and boot Linux. Do you know how can I use the option for Opal hardware encryption, during the installing for a distro? currently I’m on Fedora.
Thankyou!

6

Is this really true?if so which ones do you recommend

7

Following Micay on Mastodon saved me from buying new SSDs I guess :joy: .

Disclaimer: SSDs and storage security is not something I know a lot about.

But Samsung seems to have a decent security (according to Micay at least), and OPAL v2 seems to have improved over v1. So I would recommend newer Samsung SSDs, which is what I use too.