Self-encrypting drives are little better than software-based encryption

Companies relying on self-encrypting drives (SEDs) to secure data stored on their employees' laptops should be aware that this technology is not immune to attack and should carefully consider whether they want to use this rather than software-based approaches.

Daniel Boteanu and Kevvie Fowler from KPMG Canada demonstrated three data recovery methods against laptops using SEDs at the Black Hat Europe security conference in Amsterdam Thursday.

Self-encrypting drives perform the data encryption and decryption operations on a dedicated crypto processor that is part of the drive controller. That gives them several, mainly performance-related, benefits compared to software-based encryption products which rely on the CPU.

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