![]() They may contain some information useful for your needs. There are some caveats to be aware of, such as the limited character set allowed by the BIOS, the limited length, and the use of scan codes.īelow are my notes that I scribbled down while testing ATA security on a unused spare drive (the last thing I wanted is to ruin a shiny new Samsung SSD because of some silly mistake). ![]() What I recommend instead is to use a third party tool like hdparm to activate the ATA security and set both user and master passwords for the drive. In short: If your notebook dies, you may not be able to use your user and master passwords anymore, which means your SSD will remain locked without access to read, write or erase any data within the device. And what’s just as bad, because the hash routine is unknown, you won’t be able to gather the actual password used to encrypt the drive’s encryption keys – in other words, you won’t be able to use the drive with another computer or tool that doesn’t rely on the same hashing method. That sounds good, doesn’t it? Well, what it doesn’t tell you is that the paraphrase is converted using some unknown hashing algorithm and reduced to a pathetic 7 bytes before it’s sent as the password to the device. For instance, (older) Thinkpads have an option to allow for long password paraphrases (with up to 64 characters). ![]() Using the BIOS is like using a blackbox, where you have no idea what the underlying code does to the password that you enter before it’s sent to the drive. One way of doing that is to set an ATA user password for the drive, which is supported by the BIOS of most notebooks. But first, to benefit from the encryption, I needed to encrypt the underlying encryption keys. ![]() It’s a self-encrypting drive where data is always stored with AES-256 encryption. Recently I purchased a Samsung 840 Pro SSD for my frayed old notebook (a Thinkpad X200s). ![]()
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AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2023
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