Comment by deadfece | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deadfece | Hacker News Reader

Some of Seagate's drives require signed firmware.

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/savvio-fa...

8.7 AUTHENTICATED FIRMWARE DOWNLOAD In addition to providing a locking mechanism to prevent unwanted firmware download attempts, the drive also only accepts download files which have been cryptographically signed by the appropriate Seagate Design Center. Three conditions must be met before the drive will allow the download operation: 1. The download must be an SED file. A standard (base) drive (non-SED) file will be rejected. 2. The download file must be signed and authenticated. 3. As with a non-SED drive, the download file must pass the acceptance criteria for the drive. For example it must be applicable to the correct drive model, and have compatible revision and customer status.

Next week on Der Spiegel: NSA stole drive manufacturers' private keys.

"stole"

Yes, stole. As repeatedly evidenced - most recently with the Gemalto documents - the NSA far prefers to obtain keys surreptitiously than to go through the trouble of legally compelling corporations to provide them.

No corporation would continue to use a private key they divulged to outside sources, there is no reason to other than a minor syncing headache.

Looking at the "Lavabit" incident, there's obviously some legal framework that allows a government entity in the USA to force a company to surrender a copy of the private key used for email encryption.

If said company would change the private key, obviously the same legal framework can be used to get this new key, in turn. So it's fruitless.

Of course, if it's an "inofficial" leak, a revocation and renewal of keys makes sense.

Issuing an NSL is not really "trouble" for them. As we have seen now countless of times...

The fact that you have seen it is the trouble.

Note the 'N'stands for 'National' and Gemalto is not American.

So? Listed company, locations in TX.

http://www.gemalto.com/companyinfo/offices-locator

Signed firmware is generally only featured on SAS drives. I image the NSA is much more interested in infecting the more common SATA drives which have no such protection.

I imagine they also have the capability to sign firmware if they need to.

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