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SecurDisc data protection
LG has an exclusive licence until the end of September 2007 for SecurDisc technology with its developers Ahead Software (Nero) and HL Data Storage. SecurDisc claims the following advantages:
* Data Reliability to save your data if a disc is damaged;
* Password Protection to prevent unwanted access to your data;
* Data Integrity Check to preserve your data over time;
* Digital Signature to verify the authenticity of your files; and
* Copy Protection to stop unwanted copying of PDF documents.
The Data Reliability feature relies on the premise that recordable CDs and DVDs are rarely filled to anywhere near capacity, so the remaining empty space on the media can be used for additional redundant code derived from the information selected for writing to the disc. If the disc is damaged, this redundant code can be used to try and reconstruct the missing data.
Providing good-quality media are used and discs are handled with care (that is, fingerprints, dirt and scratches are avoided and discs are properly stored), then the redundancy and checksum coding already used for standard CD and DVD is quite robust and data loss is most unusual. However, many users treat CDs and DVDs as if they are indestructable, which they are not. SecurDisc's Data Reliability feature acknowledges these bad habits and puts yet another layer of redundancy on top of what’s already there, so sloppy users can continue treating their media badly. Of course, even this extra redundancy does not guarantee that data can be recovered from a damaged disc.
A drawback of the Data Reliability feature is that apparently it cannot be turned off, and will always fill all empty space with redundancy data. This means that archiving or copying relatively small amounts of data can take much longer as the extra redundancy code is created and written to the disc. Presumably it's also the case that large volumes of data are not as well protected by this system because less free space is available to store the extra redundancy data.
SecurDisc allows data written to the drive to be encrypted using the AES 128-bit algorithm. The user supplies a password when the data is written to a disc; this password must then be entered to decrypt and read the data. The current Nero software insists that the password must be at least 16 characters in length. It also has a password strength indicator divided into 'weak', 'medium' and 'strong'.
According to this gauge, a strong password must be many hundreds of characters in length. This illustates the major weakness of password systems, because strong passwords are certainly not likely to be easily memorised or easy to enter. Therefore it’s likely that any strong password chosen will be stored as a possibly vulnerable file and simply cut and pasted. Authentication of data written with SecurDisc is also provided by private/public key pair digital signature.
The Data Integrity feature is intended to provide advanced warning of data corruption due to disc damage. It checks for errors between the redundant copies of the data and generates a warning message if these are at critical levels. At this point the data should still be retrievable and may be copied to a fresh disc.
SecurDisc allows files to be copy protected so they can only be read from the original disc and these files cannot be copied to another drive.
At present this facility is only available for PDFs and once protected these files can only be read on a drive with SecurDisc hardware support.
SecurDisc-protected media can be read in a non-SecurDisc drive, by installing and using Nero InCD Reader 5.5. When a SecurDisc is inserted in a non-SecurDisc drive, an autorun program checks for SecurDisc hardware support. If this is absent, the autorun program displays a message linking to the InCD download web page.
This only applies to non-copy-protected discs. TO read a copy-protected (PDF-only) SecurDisc, a SecurDisc-compatible drive is required.
Software tools and updates to use SecurDisc can be downloaded from the SecurDisc web site. These include the SecurDisc Viewer for reading files, version 5 of InCD Reader and a full update of Nero 7 with SecurDisc support.
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