Toshiba’s Self Erasing Drives leave thieves empty handed

When we talk about data theft, we’re usually talking about trojans and backdoors: hackers tunneling into your machine over the Internet and slurping down your most sensitive data.
There’s a less widely feared method of stealing personal data from a user, though: ripping the user’s hard drive from the machine physically and transplanting it into another PC entirely.
Just try doing that kind of brain transplant with one of Toshiba’s new Self Erasing Drives. Rip it out of one computer and try to plug it into another and the SED will instantly wipe its most sensitive data, leaving thieves with nothing but an empty hard drive.
This isn’t just any old erase which shareware unerasing tools can reverse. Instead, the SED performs a full cryptographic erase on itself. The difference is in the method. In a normal erase, a hard drive simply overwrites several times until it’s no longer readable, while a cryptoerase destroys the crypto keys necessary to unlock that data, which is done using a 256-bit AES algorithm. If you’ve ever lost an iPhone, this is the same method employed by Apple to enable remote wipes of a smartphone.
You can configure the Toshiba SED in multiple ways, one of which destroys the entire hard drive if it is ripped out of its usual machine. Another wipes certain sections of the disk on every reboot; still another wipes out parts of the drive if an unauthorized host tries to connect, or a password is entered incorrectly too many times.
Otherwise, Toshiba’s SEDs are standard hard drives, coming in sizes of up to 640GB. Technically, Toshiba’s not doing anything here with hardware that software can’t perform, and in fact, the next version of OS X reportedly protects data similarly using software. Still, hardware encryption is ultimately the only way to be sure that your data is safe at all, and the Toshiba Self Erasing Drive leaves absolutely no room for compromise: either your data is secure, or it’s gone.
Read more at Toshiba, via Gadget Lab

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