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We need open source firmware
- greenyoda 12y ago"nobody has ever bought (or not bought) a hard drive because of better firmware." This may not be true for solid state drives, where the algorithms used in the firmware could significantly affect the performance, reliability and lifetime of the drive.
- hga 12y agoMaybe true in the consumer world, but Western Digital attempted to enter the SCSI enterprise market in the mid-late '90s and I'm told failed because their firmware's write speeds were not competitive compared to Seagate and IBM ... and they ended up buying the latter after it's disk division passed through Hitachi.
- geoelectric 12y agoI'd like to see open source firmware too. But to the specific argument, wouldn't a reference hash of the blob and/or crypto signing be adequate to verify it's what was delivered?
- cottonseed 12y agoWouldn't full-disk encryption mitigate hard drive firmware attacks?
- jlubawy 12y agoFDE will not help in this case since it only encrypts user data written to the media. However, some of the higher-end HDD models have signed firmware support which renders firmware useless unless it is cryptographically signed by the manufacturer.
- cottonseed 12y agoI don't understand this. If you're using FDE, how does the hacked firmware ever escape the drive?
- jernst 12y agoSomething verifyable definitely would help, like with a checksum. But then, how do make sure that what you are verifying is actually what is running?