Hard Disk Will Have Hackers Seeing Double

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,102881,00.asp

Kuriko Miyake, IDG News Service
Monday, July 22, 2002

Hackers will be unable to attack Web sites protected by a new security
system unless they can change the laws of physics, according to Naoto
Takano, chief executive officer of Scarabs, a Japanese company.

The company claims that it has developed a hard disk with two heads
that prevents disk files published on the Web from being altered by
hackers.

Scarabs put two heads on the hard disk, a read-only head that is
connected via one cable to a Web server for people to browse content
on the disk file and a read/write head that is connected by another
cable to a PC for administrators who renew the data. Internet users
have access to the disk file only through the read-only head and so
there is no physical way they can go into the system and rewrite the
data.

Original Idea

The original idea of a hard disk having two heads emerged around 1985,
when Takano was a scientific researcher. Analysis of data took a long
time because all the data needed to be written to a drive before it
could be read out again. If the hard disk was fitted with a read-only
head, which could start reading data for analysis while the read/write
head was still writing data on the disk, analysis could be done
faster. At that time, however, the idea was never implemented.

"I realized about three to four years ago, this could be used for
server system security on the Internet," Takano says.

The company succeeded in making a prototype last December. Since then,
it has been showing real-time video streaming images on the Web.

In the prototype, each head works independently, and as long as both
the Internet server and the internal company PC are running operating
systems which can read the same disk format, it could run on any
operating system, Takano says. The prototype currently works on
Windows NT4.0 CD-ROM running Active Server Pages and IIS, Takano says.

It costs around $863 to build the simplest version of this system,
Takano says.

Modified Version

Scarabs is also working on a different version of the
technology--instead of putting two heads on a hard disk, the company
is connecting two SCSI interface circuits to a conventional hard disk
with one head, one set to send read-only electronic signals and the
other to send read/write signals.

"From an end user's point of view, the electronic implementation is
more complicated but the professionals and vendors are more interested
in this method. We have approached three vendors so far and hopefully,
will be able to start sample shipping within this year," Takano says.



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