I just bought WD My Passport Essential SE 1TB USB 3.0 drive, but before I put my precious files there, I need to make decision what kind of protection to use. There are 2 obvious choices: the WD’s disk password and the TrueCrypt software.
I’m fan of TrueCrypt, which is by far the best software to protect data. It is very well documented, free (as in free beer), there are sources available, doesn’t have any government backdoors inside, has carefully selected algorithms. In short - very well implemented piece of cryptography.
I would like to know in more details how does WD’s HDD password work. Is there any doument that outlines its internals? How is data protected – is it encrypted in some way? If so, then by which algorithm? And how long is the actual master key used to encrypt data?
Cryptographic solutions are only trustworthy if they are publicly known, not obscured, so anyone brave can try to bypass them and fail. I don’t need, or want, to crack the drive’s encryption, I just need to know if I can trust it. And you may call me paranoid
I don’t know about any documents but their password encryption is handled by a circuit board on the drive itself. There is no way to bypass or reset password. If the board fails you’re screwed. The board is full of posts with people moaining the fact there is no reset.
I don’t know about any documents but their password encryption is handled by a circuit board on the drive itself. There is no way to bypass or reset password. If the board fails you’re screwed. The board is full of posts with people moaining the fact there is no reset.
Wow I’ve read a little, and I’m going to return the thing as soon as possible. I’m not interested in the encryption anymore
First, I saw posts that suggested there is _something_ in the enclosure, you can’t put the disk in another enclosure if it fails (for example if USB socket breaks, and it happens, it happened to me, too), because the data is not readable.
I installed just the app to let me lock the drive, and here’s what I saw:
and after decompression Kaspersky told me there’s malware in it:
Trojan-Downloader.Win32.FraudLoad.ylfj
In file: C:\Users\myname\AppData\Local\Temp\ckz_7C8R\SmartWare Firmware Updater\Self-Extracting WD Application\NFU.dll
and that sounds serious…
I’ll probably resort to a plain disk with a 3rd party USB enclosure, it worked very reliably for years. So there’s no TrueCrypt vs disk encryption problem anymore.
It’s probably false posative on the Kapersky detection because it is trying to access the internet to check for updates. There are also a lot of cases with these drives setting a password on their own.
Sereval antivirus programs use the Kapersky engine in their product so that is part of the problem. This has been discusssed before. I admit it doesn’t make the average person feel very secure.
