Trusted Computing Group

Self-encrypting drives have become the de facto standard for data protection, with dozens of vendors supporting the specs in drives and management software. To date, for example, Hitachi, Micron, Samsung, Seagate Technologies and Toshiba offer products that support the TCG specifications for desktop/laptop and enterprise drives. OEMs offering these drives include Dell, HP, Lenovo and others. Other companies supporting the TCG specifications include LSI, Marvell, Sandforce, ULINK, and IBM. Management software is offered by Absolute, CryptoMill, McAfee, Secude, Softex, Sophos, Symantec, Wave and WinMagic. For a complete list and details, please click here.

In fact, SEDs are seen as an ideal solution for data protection against increasingly common breaches of sensitive information. Such breaches are costly, embarrassing and can even lead to the demise of the offending company. According to the Ponemon Institute, which has studied this issue closely, "...(cost of data breaches) reached $214 per compromised record and averaged $7.2 million per data breach event. The fact is that individuals still care deeply about their personal information and they lose trust in companies that fail to protect it. It's not only direct costs of a data breach, such as notification and legal defense costs that impact the bottom line for companies, but also indirect costs like lost customer business due to abnormal churn..." This is from March 2011 and no doubt the costs continue to escalate.

So what's new with the SED effort from TCG? In the last month, TCG released version 1.02 of the Storage Interface Interactions Specification (SIIS). This  spec defines how the TCG Storage Core Specification and  Storage Security Class specifications (such as the Opal SSC and the Enterprise SSC) interact with existing industry storage device interfaces and transports. 

The new version of the SIIS adds support for additional interfaces. These include USB and UAS, which lets developers implement TCG Storage solutions on externally-attached USB storage devices. Also now supported: The brand-new NVM Express storage interface, which lets developers support TCG storage solutions in high-performance PCI Express® solid state drives.  NVM Express defines an optimized register interface, command set, and feature set for PCI Express®-based solid-state drives. For more information, visit http://www.nvmexpress.org.

The new SIIS and information can be found here.

Check out a number of TCG white papers and other resources to learn more about SEDs.