GuardianEdge put out a press release this week announcing Encrypted Drive Manager. This software will allow you to managed hardware encrypted hard drives as well as drives encrypted with GuardianEdge Hard Disk all from one platform. This will be released in Q2 2010. When I was evaluating GuardianEdge in 2007 they talked about these features so its nice to see it finally (soon to be) making it to market.
Hardware based encryption may finally be ready to ignite. The Trusted Computing Group has been working on standards so its not such a mishmash. Performing the encryption on hardware keeps the encryption keys out of memory so it isn’t vulnerable to cold boot attacks. There isn’t a CPU performance penalty as there can be with software encryption. Wiping a drive is as simple as removing the encryption key.
The main problem has been manageability. You need to be able to corporately manage accounts on the hardware encrypted drive just as you do with the software encryption. It has to be enterprise ready. Its necessary to be able to manage both software and hardware based Full Disk Encryption and GuardianEdge is going to allow for that.
I anticipate a time when the drives we order in our standard systems will all be hardware FDE capable and managed by GuardianEdge.
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