Momentus FDE Drives Achieve FIPS 140-2 Level 2 Certification

Last week, in What’s a FIPS anyway, I talked about some looming certification for Seagate’s Momentus line of laptop drives. Today, that became reality in an announcement released by Seagate. The Seagate Momentus FDE drives have achieved certification (Certificate No. 1388) FIPS 140-2 Level 2 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Communications Security Establishment (CSEC) organizations..  I asked Joni Clark, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for the Momentus Family of laptop drives what’s so special about the FIPS 140-2 certification and what it means to storage suppliers and end users.

What is so compelling about this announcement?

The Seagate Momentus FDE drives, also known as Self-Encrypting Drives, are the first in the industry to achieve the FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certification for the encryption module designed right into the disk drive.  Hardware based encryption enables faster encryption, secure pre-boot and is hacker resistant by design.  In fact, the Momentus FDE Self-Encrypting Drive is resistive to even the most resourceful hacker attempts such as the Evil Maid or the Princeton Cold Boot scenario.

What does it mean for customers?

The FIPS 140-2 validation process provides government and commercial customers an objective assessment that they can use to reliably qualify the security of products.  The FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certification is for products that implement hardware based encryption.   These products typically offer more security, are harder to break into, and are easier for integrators, administrators and users to use without disabling the encryption.

Related Posts on Security click here