Explore Seagate Secure

View this interactive presentation on Seagate Security technology.

Related Topics

Security Home
• Technologies and Guidance
• Tools and Resources
• News and Events
• Ask the Expert
• White Papers and Case Studies

Seagate® delivers the highest level of data security with its innovative Seagate Secure ™ technology, protecting data where it lives—on the hard drive. Seagate Secure technology uses hardware-based security that takes advantage of the hard drive’s closed environment to isolate data storage for stronger protection.

Seagate Secure technology offers an easy and effective way to deliver a high level of security for digital information. Hard drives featuring Seagate Secure technology combine capacity, reliability and comprehensive security capabilities to provide the ultimate protection. In addition, Seagate Secure technology offers a development platform for independent software vendors (ISVs) to create more robust applications that can manage security functions or interoperate with secure storage.

Some of the key benefits and features provided by Seagate Secure technology include:

• Drive pairing, which allows users to lock a drive to a specific system, preventing a hard drive from being pulled out of a system and installed elsewhere.
• Secure partitions, which enable hidden storage, accessible only by Seagate Secure technology-enabled software applications.
• Secure erase and disposal, which simplifies and secures hard drive disposal and reuse to allow technicians to safely repurpose or dispose of the drive.

Seagate Secure technology comprises four components: enhanced firmware to extend the hard drive’s capabilities; trusted send/receive to ensure widespread support; secure partitions to increase the level of security, and issuance protocol to enable ISVs to write and assign applications to the drive. Together, these elements create an extremely secure storage solution.

Enhanced Firmware

Firmware, the software that runs on a hard drive’s internal computer, is typically dedicated to complex drive functions, such as moving the read/write heads, tracking bad sectors on the disk and storing bitmaps of where data is located. Seagate Secure technology-enhanced firmware extends the hard drive’s capabilities with transparent security optimized on the drive’s computing resources.

Trusted Send/Receive

Another critical element of Seagate Secure technology is the trusted send/receive specification designed in collaboration with the standards bodies that define ATA and SCSI interfaces. Virtually every type of storage device uses either ATA or SCSI interface technology, so having the specification incorporated into those interface standards ensures widespread support for Seagate Secure technology.

Secure Partitions

A 200-GB drive reserves roughly 200 MB for internal system memory. Seagate Secure technology uses this space to create secure partitions that are both logically and physically separated from the rest of the drive memory with strong conditional access controls, providing an excellent place to store cryptographic keys or highly sensitive data like Social Security numbers and financial data.

Issuance Protocol

Software applications, BIOS and other programs interoperate with a Seagate Secure technology-equipped drive through strictly controlled communication channels. ISVs and developers can write applications and have them assigned to a secure partition in the drive through the issuance protocol.

Seagate developed Seagate Secure technology as a platform for defining the role of hard drives with respect to security, privacy and trust. Seagate presented Seagate Secure technology to the Storage Work Group of the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) for the purpose of extending trust and security to storage devices. TCG is a not-for-profit organization formed to develop, define and promote open standards for hardware-enabled trusted computing and security technologies. The organization’s Storage Work Group includes all leading hard drive manufacturers, as well as vendors of flash storage, storage management and storage integration. Seagate maintains a leadership role in TCG and actively contributes to TCG efforts.