It's been awhile since we've heard of any major advancements in the world of quantum cryptography, but at long last the silence is being broken by a squad of jubilant Austrian physicists. As the story goes, a team from Austria's Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) managed to send "entangled photons" 90 miles between the Spanish islands of Las Palmas and the Balearics. Calling the ephemeral test successful, the crew has boldly asserted that it's now feasible to send "this kind of unbreakable encrypted communication through space using satellites." Funny -- last we remember, quantum cryptography still had a few kinks to work through here beneath the stratosphere.

It seems that Dell jumped the gun a wee bit by shedding some light on Samsung's forthcoming self-encrypting SSDs, but now Sammy is providing us with all the missing details... er, most of them, anyway. In conjunction with Wave Systems, Samsung is launching what it calls an industry first with its new line of solid state drives. Said devices are able to automatically encrypt information as it's saved to the drive, and they each come bundled with Wave's EMBASSY management software. At least initially, these super secure SSDs will ship in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB flavors, and while we're told that the whole lot is available now "through at least one major OEM," there's no specific mention of price. Shocker, we know. The full release is after the break.

Dell's been doing both solid state and encrypted drives for some time now, but only now is the company combining both efforts and preparing to offer encrypted SSDs in the coming months. The Samsung-manufactured drives will come in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB options, and though the hardware encryption method isn't specified, we'd venture a guess it'll have something to do with Trusted Computer Group's 128-bit standards adopted by Sammy and virtually every other drive maker back in January. No word just yet on how much they'll cost, but if current prices are any indication, it won't come cheap.

We've seen quite a few hardware-encrypted disks hit the scene lately, but to be honest, we've always thought they were a risky investment, since all the systems were proprietary -- we wouldn't want to store our encryption-worthy data on a disk that can't be read at all in a few years, after all. That's happily about to change, though -- the Trusted Computing Group has just announced that virtually every drive maker has agreed on a set of 128-bit encryption standards covering SSDs and HDDs. That's Fujitsu, Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba, Western Digital, IBM, Wave Systems, LSI, and ULink Technology, if you're keeping score at home (and we know you are). Ideally this means that we'll see easy cheap disk encryption filter onto mainstream consumer storage, which would basically invalidate all those "I'm stealing this hard drive out of your laptop and using it to log into your Facebook account" crimes of passion we know the kids are into these days. Best part? Fujitsu, Seagate and Hitachi are all already shipping drives that support the TCG standards.

[Via Digg]

If you use a thumb-drive sans security your data is just a vacant USB port away from being thrown up on the internet, assets exposed to the world like some drunken heiress. Even secure devices, whether they use biometric scanners, hardware encryption, or even more extreme measures, all leave a lot to be desired: no standards means limited compatibility, and secure data you can't reliably access might as well be random strings of binary digits. The answer could be IEEE 1667, the "Standard Protocol for Authentication in Host Attachments of Transient Storage Devices." Among other things it would enable you to restrict where your thumb drive will work and, conversely, what thumb drives your machine will accept. If it becomes the standard it was born to be you'll be able to apply the same policies whether you're opening Windows 7, cuddling with Snow Leopard, or making jazz-hands with something a little less mainstream. Will it succeed? CNET's Jon Oltsik thinks Microsoft's support for the standard is a good omen and says "Let's all follow Redmond's lead in this case for the greater good." That's certainly not something you hear every day, but this time we're game.

It's all here: 2.5-inch, 9.5-mm thick form factor; 3.0Gbps SATA interface; 250GB per platter for a 500GB total capacity; 5,400 RPM spin; and hardware-based data encryption using a 128-bit key (we presume, they don't say). That puts Hitachi's new 500GB Travelstar hard disk drives on par with pretty much everyone else. Even the 1.4 watt read/write power draw that Hitachi says, "is lower than any other 500GB 2.5-inch hard drive on the market today" was just matched by Fujitsu who goes even further with 256-bit encryption. No use crying Hitachi, that's what happens when you show up late for a party. Expect to see the 5K500.B disk ship worldwide in December while the 1.4 watt E5K500.B ("E" for Eco) is expected by the end of March 2009.

Today's corporate laptops tend to be bristling with security measures, able to uniquely identify your fingers and faces on top of whatever authentication measures your operating system offers. But, without some kind of encryption, the drives inside are left completely vulnerable to anyone with a screwdriver. Seagate has been combating that with its AES-packing Momentus Full Drive Encryption disks for years, finally updating the range with a suite of larger and faster models. The first is the Momentus 5400 FDE.3, a 5400RPM drive with 8MB of cache available in 160GB and 320GB sizes. There's also the Momentus 7200 FDE, coming in the same two capacities but with twice the cache and, predictably, spinning at 7200RPM. Seagate's promising 500GB flavors soon, all with onboard AES encryption that doesn't impact boot times or overall performance. Just don't forget that BIOS password, yeah?

pureSilicon isn't offering up the first rugged SSD or anything, but its Renegade line is still tough enough to be compliant with MIL-STD-810F (and this guy's) standards. Hailed as the first solid state drive to integrate hardware-based encryption approved by the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), the device boasts up to 128GB of capacity, a dedicated on-board cryptographic processor, hard-anodized unibody enclosure and the ability to withstand most anything that you could put it through (save for a blender). Select customers have already received samples, but if you're dumbstruck by such a notion, you'll have to wait with the rest of the citizenry and nab yours in Q1 2009.

Call us devilish, but we just can't help but love these types of stories. Here we have yet another overly confident group of researchers grossly underestimating the collective power of the hacking underground, as gurus from all across Europe have joined together to announce "the first commercial communication network using unbreakable encryption based on quantum cryptography." Interestingly enough, quantum cryptography has already been cracked in a kinda-sorta way, but that's not stopping these folks from pushing this claim hard to government agencies, financial institutions and companies with distributed subsidiaries. We've no doubt this stuff is pretty secure, but the last time we heard someone utter a claim similar to this, we saw him uncomfortably chowing down on those very words merely months later.

[Via Physorg]

Psst... hey you. Yeah, you. Tired of having to sleep with one eye on your HDD? Enter Raidon's STARAY S3 Series Data Encryption Box, which enables the drive within to be partitioned into public and private parts. There's also talk of S-Codes and X-Codes in order to ratchet up security, and the keypad-based password entry ensures that data snatchers will have to extract strings of thought from your brain before they can tap into your collection of 1980s-era R&B videos. Get yours sent to an undisclosed underground location for just $69, but don't forget to order up a hard drive while you're at it.

Although several Indian news outlets reported last week that RIM was preparing to let the Indian government monitor the domestic Blackberry network, it appears that the outcry has prompted the company to change course and announce that it's committed to "serving security-conscious businesses in the Indian market." That's a big reversal from the rumored plan, which would have allowed Indian security agencies access to the network in exchange for taking the blame for any leak of user data. Of course, not everything's quite settled yet: the Indian government is still demanding that RIM furnish "satisfactory answers" to its security questions, and RIM told the AFP that there are some other ways for "government to take care of security concerns" without elaborating further. Based on RIM's enterprise-heavy statements and refusal to comment on the consumer service, we'd guess that enterprise customers will probably get to keep their networks locked down, but that consumers shouldn't expect their messages to be secure. Not the best compromise, but we'll see how this all plays out.