[Empire_of_Liberty]

Shadow, I am a systems engineer, too. Or I should say I was one.

I ended up in storage, and saw the disk drive migrate from an electromechanical device, whose challenges were performance and reliability, into a nightmare of software “security” considerations.

I always wondered why. The disk drive should simply store encrypted data, just as any data.

There are probably many answers, but I think the primary is that people want the impossible from “security”. There is always a time factor to security. Encryption, or any security measure, can only provide a probability of security which diminishes with time. Eventually, all security is cracked.

At least that’s my take on it.

[ShadowAce]

I agree. Even one-way hashes can be cracked given enough horsepower and time.

The (current) key is to make the encryption difficult enough to make it not worth the time/effort to crack it. Putting in backdoors for "gov't use" just negates that. Someone will find it easier to just find the backdoor or to phish it from the people who have them. And someone will always succeed because most people (especially gov't employees) are on the left side of the Bell curve.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Good take.