Ok … then things have changed since I was working on the initial trusted and 
FDE drives 8 years ago. My apologies if I misdirected things.

Gary Little
H (952) 223-1349
C (952) 454-4629 
[email protected]


On Mar 23, 2012, at 3:30 PM, Sam Kuper wrote:

> On 23 March 2012 19:43, Gary Little <[email protected]> wrote:
>> They are hard drives. Plug them into any SAS or SATA controller and they 
>> will be look like any hard drive, work like any hard drive, and will be 
>> recognized by any BIOS or EFI that I know of, until you configure them to 
>> enable FDE, which is supported by both T10 and T13 committees. Even as a 
>> configured FDE they will appear but require authentication, very likely 
>> using a TPM on the CPU motherboard for key and certificate storage.
> 
> Seagate seems to believe otherwise. From the link I provided: "Newer
> Mac systems use the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) in lieu of a
> BIOS.  The traditional ATA Security set passwords are system managed
> and depend on BIOS which means that the newer Apple notebook systems
> cannot set or use traditional ATA Security passwords.  The Seagate
> Secure passwords are managed by client software."
> 
> Apologies if I've misunderstood.
> 
>> What do  you mean by "FOSS firmware"? To my knowledge when you hit the power 
>> switch on a computer the first thing that starts is what we have called the 
>> BIOS for at least 20 years and today includes EFI. That's part of the 
>> motherboard and to me really has nothing to do with FOSS, or any kind of 
>> free open source software. As far as the hard drive itself, that firmware is 
>> written by the manufacturer and typically tailored or even totally 
>> re-written for every model of hard drive in their inventory.
> 
> I mean the algorithm that gets a key from the user, caches it, and
> uses it to perform encryption/decryption on writes/reads to the
> storage space on the drive. Since I understood that algorithm to be
> being executed on the drive in the case of Seagate/Hitachi FDE drives,
> "firmware" seemed the right term.
> 
>> So, given FOSS does not work with a given hard drive, my first thought would 
>> be to wonder what's wrong with the FOSS.
> 
> I'm afraid I don't understand this statement.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Sam
> _______________________________________________
> macports-users mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-users

_______________________________________________
macports-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-users

Reply via email to