Invisible encyption, retro style
- IT TOPICS:Hardware
My Frankly Speaking column this week was about Seagate's just-announced FDE drives, which will automatically encrypt data as it's stored and decrypt it as it's retrieved -- a good solution to the problem of sensitive data on discarded or stolen equipment.
"Why didn't this happen sooner?" I asked in the column.
Turns out it has, sort of, according to a message from a reader:
"I remember when I worked in the IT department at Kelly Services they had a novel way of handling encryption:
they used a BIOS encryption routine that encrypted the data being written to the floppy disk (in those days the only worry was data going out to a floppy!).
"They could encrypt the entire fleet of computers so that machines using the modified BIOS would scramble data to the
device so that taking a floppy disk home rendered it useless ... and vice versa.
"It was a novel way of handling data security. It must have modified the read/write mechanism to the floppy drive, because you could laplink around it, but the floppy itself was encrypted."
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