Japanese companies team to protect content on removable hard drives
Hitachi, Pioneer, Sanyo, Sharp to develop, license SAFIA scheme
By EE Times
10:45 AM EDT Tue. Apr. 26, 2005 E-mail this article
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MANHASSET, N.Y. — Hitachi Ltd., Pioneer Corp., Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd., and Sharp Corp. have agreed to develop and license Security Architecture For Intelligent Attachment (SAFIA) content protection technologies for removable hard drives used in consumer electronics and PCs.
The four companies have also formed a group to develop, promote and license SAFIA technologies for Information Versatile Disk for Removable Usage (iVDR) removable hard drive standard. The group is expected to widely contribute to developing removable HDD appliances for digital entertainment applications.
SAFIA incorporates the AES-128 algorithm for encryption of content, PKI based bi-directional authentication, and a secure transfer protocol for strong security. It integrates a content encryption key and usage rules for secure content access, and a secure content move and delete function.
iVDR is a small, light removable hard disk drive that can be carried around. It provides a huge capacity and high speed random access capability utilizing hard disk drive features. The interface is based on serial ATA and supports data transfer rates up to 1.5Gbps.
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