Melbourne Linux Users Group, Inc.

Welcome, {user_name}
[logout]

Menu
Home Meeting Info History Files Presentations Projects Charter

Upcoming Events
There are no upcoming events

Topics
Home Website News (2/0) General News (5/1) LUG News / Business (2/0) Geeklog News (8/0)

User Functions
Username: Password: Don't have an account yet? Sign up as a New User

Older Stories
Sunday 28-May Z4CK 2, novel (20) Thursday 18-May Dapper Drake (66) Wednesday 03-May Debian Wiki (41) Internet and Congress (45) Friday 10-Mar Loaded Debian SPARC on Sun Blade 150 (42) Wednesday 01-Feb Linux-Med (28) Friday 28-Oct New Site is up! (32)

Home »

Support »

ATA Disk security lo..

ATA Disk security lock

dzsiga

Registered: 10/31/05
Posts: 1

Wednesday, December 19 2007 @ 03:12 PM EST

In our discussion on Tuesday I mentioned a potential risk related to ATA disk drive security passwords . I think some of you are familiar with this functionality, but maybe didn't understand what I was asking about. I've been concerned about whether it is possible for some exploit to abuse these security commands, resulting in loss of access to data on the drive.

The ATA spec allows a “user” password to be set to prevent unauthorized access to the disk. There is also a “master” password set by the vendor that can unlock the drive if the user password is lost. The security level can be set to “high” or “maximum” when the password is required. When set to maximum security mode, using the master password causes the disk to zero the drive before unlocking! A security “freeze” command can also be sent to disallow changes to the ATA security settings until after a power cycle.

When I first read about this a coupler years ago, the Linux hdparam program already supported these commands, and there was at least one windows tool you could download that ran them. A quick search today finds tools that not only implement them but also attempt to crack the password. As far as I can tell, if they can't crack the user password and the security level was set to maximum you still loose the data. In any case, it would be preferable to prevent the problem rather than be taken down and have to fix it.

Obviously Linux users are much less vulnerable to malware. I haven't seen any mention of anything the system does to specifically prevent abuse of the ATA security commands. Is there a valid threat? Should we be changing default passwords on our disks, or sending a “–security-freeze ” command during system initialization?

Topic Legend:

	Normal Topic
	Locked Topic
	Sticky Topic

	New Post
	Sticky Topic W/ New Post
	Locked Topic W/ New Post


	Subscribe to this topic

You may not post messages

Full HTML is allowed

Words are censored