Securing hard drives with the Security Protocol and Data Model (SPDM)

In modern computing systems, it is usually hard to defend against attacks made against the low level communication between hardware components. In this work, we address this issue by adapting a hard disk controller and a corresponding device driver to communicate securely using the recently proposed Secure Protocol and Data Model (SPDM). Essentially, SPDM standardizes authentication of hardware components, besides enabling the establishment of secure communication channels among them. To assess the overhead introduced by SPDM in this scenario, we tested our solution against an unmodified, unsecured hard disk on an emulated environment. Our experiments show that, while SPDM can make the task of copying a large up to $7\times$ slower, the transference of small files is virtually unaffected.