Disk encryption - SED - Remote Unlocking

[rIcK]

I am looking for a way of doing Full Disk Encryption on a system which would boot then remotely get an encryption key to unlock the drive.

Mandos seemed a good solution to that but will not work on the distro of linux I am using. There appears to be no real software alternative to this so I started to look at hardware level solution.

Self encrypting drives appear to be exactly what I am looking for with even the boot partition being encrypted, they appear to boot into a "mini - os" which allows the user to enter the decryption password.

http://www.trustedcomputinggroup.or...uestions_and_answers_on_selfencrypting_drives

According to the above article it is even possible to get these to boot using tcp/ip. I do like the look of the Samsung 810 / 830 SSD SED drives but I do not have a clue about the implementation of this "mini OS" or if what I want to do is possible?

Is there any pre built software packages specifically made for this sort of thing for interacting with SEDs, or would this mini OS boot allow me to create something to "dial" home to unlock the main hard drive?

Any further information would be greatly appreciated!

 

[AbsenceJam]

believe a few commercial packages and even BitLocker support this sort of thing, there are some that will administer SED disks as well but you're going to need to contact some vendors who mention it as they don't publish many details.