Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed • Hacker News Board

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#121

Post by paulmd » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 6:35 PM UTC

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #38

rwmj wrote: post #33

My friend once worked at a place where the security policy was that every part of the PC including monitors was crushed and shredded. This was a financial services company, but nevertheless totally over the top.

I recently had a Dell monitor spaz out. Even powered off and powered back on, it was somehow keeping a (corrupted) image of what it had shown when last plugged in to my laptop. It's unclear how that's possible, but others witnessed it. Had this been during something sensitive being displayed, it might warrant shredding that particular monitor. I have no idea how long the phantom image would have lasted. An hour, a da…

> I recently had a Dell monitor spaz out. Even powered off and powered back on, it was somehow keeping a (corrupted) image of what it had shown when last plugged in to my laptop. It's unclear how that's possible, but others witnessed it.

Stored in the monitor control board somewhere.

Especially in the VRR era, monitors need to buffer the image in case it needs to be redrawn, or if the transfer rate is faster than the draw rate. Which will be anytime the monitor isn't drawing at max VRR sync speed.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#122

Post by EMCymatics » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 6:36 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #94

JohnFen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anybody actually want hard drives this old? Sure, I would! I frequently use hard drives much older than this, and while I know there's an increased risk of failure, it has never happened to me -- so that risk appears to be quite tiny.

Take a look at how failure rates dramatically accelerate once you hit 5 years: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/ The risk is anything but tiny. "How long do drives last? It would appear a reasonable estimate of the median life expectancy is six years and nine months."

It is wild how many failure rates coincide with warranty.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#123

Post by EMCymatics » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 6:38 PM UTC

omniglottal wrote: post #115

EMCymatics wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monitors can be a security risk

So can a cat. Is the solution, then, to crush them all, treating an imperceptible risk as a certainty? Let's also treat all suspects as guilty until proven innocent to address even more risk! /s

A cat has no business being in an office and neither do reused computer components.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#124

Post by deepsun » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 7:00 PM UTC

Damogran6 wrote: post #92

I've had this argument til I'm blue in the face. 1. Nuke the key and an encrypted drive is indistinguishable from noise. 1a. When SAN sizes get STUPIDLY LARGE, miltiple writes are cost and energy prohibitive, crushing is cheap, cert revocation is cheaper and leaves a device with residual value. 2. In the datacenter, data at rest is not a target, the attack happens higher up the stack where the OS/SQL/App can read the…

How do you "nuke" the key? It may still be on the drive (or other drives, or magnetic tape backups).

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#125

Post by ac29 » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 7:59 PM UTC

deepsun wrote: post #124

Damogran6 wrote: post #92

I've had this argument til I'm blue in the face. 1. Nuke the key and an encrypted drive is indistinguishable from noise. 1a. When SAN sizes get STUPIDLY LARGE, miltiple writes are cost and energy prohibitive, crushing is cheap, cert revocation is cheaper and leaves a device with residual value. 2. In the datacenter, data at rest is not a target, the attack happens higher up the stack where the OS/SQL/App can read the…

How do you "nuke" the key? It may still be on the drive (or other drives, or magnetic tape backups).

If I can store drive encryption keys on a HSM in my old, consumer grade laptop, I would hope that large storage systems have at least the same degree of protection.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#126

Post by Kab1r » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 8:03 PM UTC

How risky is it to just encrypt disks or filesystems, storing the key in tpms or secure enclaves and then just discarding the key instead of actually deleting the data?

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#127

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 8:35 PM UTC

anotherhue wrote: post #114

doublerabbit wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bullshit is too weak a word. Try the English slang word for bullshit, bollocks. Or that if we wish to keep it PG: deceptive nonsense.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/bollocks

[deleted]

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#128

Post by Tuna-Fish » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 8:38 PM UTC

nielsole wrote: post #111

more_corn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I faced this same problem. My company policy required destruction of data before drives can leave the colo. I even had a hydraulic drive crusher in the cage to crush failed drives. However. The Linux utility shred can do a multi-pass random rewrite followed by zeros. (That last is critical for the next step) Then to verify, grab a random block and sum the data. If it’s not zero you crush the disk. Bake that script in…

I always understood reserve storage to be one of the main concerns. Your disk might have decommissioned some sectors / flash cells without wiping(or being able to) wipe it. The data you can pull if you bypass the drive controller e.g. by flashing custom firmware or desoldering flash chips is probably not zero.

This is the big one. I doubt anyone has any actual ability to recover anything usable from such drives, but the principle works and therefore to the grinder it goes.

Modern flash devices are supposed to be able to prevent this, the protocol has allowances for it, but I think the risk of stray data remaining on such drives is actually much higher than on HDDs, because there are a lot more relocations in SSDs than on spinning rust, and because you absolutely cannot trust the typical drive firmware to implement any of the parts of the spec that are not required for booting windows, even on supposed "enterprise" drives.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#129

Post by akvadrako » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

PaulKeeble wrote: post #56

There have been multiple challenges on hard drives with substantial reward offered for anyone able to take a basic formatted drive with a few MB of files that were overwritten with 0s and recovering the files. Not once did any company accept the challenge let alone complete it. Every data recovery company would tell you that is not possible. Today we have secure erase which is necessary to clear SSDs and I doubt ther…

> Today we have secure erase which is necessary to clear SSDs and I doubt there is any actual technology to recover from thia mechanism.

You might doubt it, but you also cannot provide much evidence against it. Trim commands just tell the controller to erase data – what they actually do internally isn't easy to discover without a major operation and internal knowledge.

The best bet is not trusting the drives at all, perhaps by storing only encrypted data, then throwing away the key.

Re: Millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed

#130

Post by deepsun » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 9:08 PM UTC

ac29 wrote: post #125

deepsun wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you "nuke" the key? It may still be on the drive (or other drives, or magnetic tape backups).

If I can store drive encryption keys on a HSM in my old, consumer grade laptop, I would hope that large storage systems have at least the same degree of protection.

But if that HSM module or machine suddenly dies, the system would lose all the customer's files. Not good.