Lenovo ThinkPad HDD Password

by Jethro Beekman – Mar 8, 2015 . Filed under: English, Technology, Security, Lenovo ThinkPad.

Modern SSDs (at least the ones made by Intel, Samsung) always encrypt all stored data using AES. The encryption key used is stored in nonvolatile memory on the SSD. One of the reasons for this is that to securely wipe the drive now you just need to overwrite the encryption key with a new random one. This way, you don’t need to erase every flash block, which is very bad for durability reasons. The encryption key can optionally be encrypted using a 32-byte “security password”, the configuration of which is overloaded on the ATA security feature set. If you trust the hardware manufacturer to actually implement this securely, this would seem to provide a very solid and fast option for encrypted persistent storage. Continue reading… – Comments