Securing pocket hard drives

Abstract

Vendors are providing schemes that support storage-based personalization while providing security measures to protect personal data on the portable storage device. USB is the most popular PC interface that offers a high data transfer rate of 480 Mbps with enough power to operate storage devices such as 2.5 inch hard-disk drives. IBM Research's SoulPad prototype allows users to carry their complete computing environment on USB storage media, including the suspended runtime state of all applications. The pocket hard drive carries a base OS that loads during bootup. An encrypted partition contains user data and applications, which the base OS decrypts to restore a user's session on the borrowed computer. VM-based attacks represent another important threat to pocket hard drives. The scheme can defend against static and dynamic attacks, leaving the adversary with only the option of formulating runtime attacks.