Self-encrypting Drives Based on TCG Opal Specifications Get Updated Open Source Support

Date Published: January, 01, 2016

Self-encrypting drives, or SEDs, continue to get support and are becoming increasingly widely used in the client and enterprise market segments. TCG recently took a look at just where and how these drives, which provide hardware-based encryption and data protection, are used –  including in iOS devices, huge data centers like Facebook’s, and many other applications.

TCG recently announced its support for the Drive Trust Alliance, which will support open source solutions to manage TCG standards-based self-encrypting drives and promote user adoption of the drives. This week, it was announced that DTA has added support for NVMe drives using the TCG Opal specification.

Recently, NVMe posted the following:“…Drive Trust Alliance maintains the popular sedutil application (formally called msed), which eases configuration of Self-Encrypting Drives implementing the TCG OPAL specification. Until recently only SATA/SCSI drives were supported by sedutil”. As of the 1.10 release, NVMe SEDs are officially supported by the Linux version of sedutil. This paves the way for NVMe OPAL SED adoption across a wide variety of datacenter, workstation, client, mobile, and IoT platforms. TCG and NVMe released a joint white paper with more details on their work. The white paper can be found here.

See SEDs in action and more enterprise and IoT security demonstrations, along with three great panels and a keynote by ESG analyst Doug Cahill, at the TCG RSA Conference session Feb. 29, 8:30 – 12:30, Moscone Center West 2002, San Francisco. For a free RSA pass and more info, go to RSA Conference registration and use code 16UTCGXPO.

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