The Mission Report
Tom Mitchell, Technical Director at Mission is without doubt an obsessive technophile. On LinkedIn, Mitchell’s profile leads with: “I try to constantly improve myself and the tools around me. I take the attitude, if I don’t like it, don’t complain, do something about it! Change it. Make it better! That and I’m totally addicted to learning new things.” Who better to try out G-Technology’s unique new ARMORLOCK technology?
“At Mission we’re always looking
at how we can provide better services to our customers. Security is an ever increasingly important focus. Major streaming services and studios are very keen on making sure that their data only gets to where it is intended. With the support of a programme called the Trusted Partner Network (TPN), one of the key things that they now insist on is the media being encrypted, particularly if it’s the camera negative. G-Technology’s new ARMORLOCK drive ticks all the TPN boxes and with some valuable extra features on top.
How security worked We’re always dealing with high
volumes of data coming off the camera which we need to be able to get down within a reasonable amount of time. So, we want the best possible performance in order for us to keep up. Until now encrypted drives were extremely expensive to get any kind of performance out of them or you just take a significant performance hit as soon as you turn the encryption on. There are generally two ways in
which we’ve been encrypting drives: either hardware encryption or software encryption. Both come with downsides.
With software encryption the data is
encrypted on the computer, so the CPU is re-encoding the information as it’s being written onto the hard drive and then decodes it as it’s reading it at the other end. So, there are two penalties: it’s slow and you’re also tying up your computer at both ends. The other form of encryption is self-
encrypting drives. This is typically done on spinning discs. The performance tends to be a little bit better, but there’s still a performance hit, and you normally need a specialist raid array in order to deal with it and specific
software in order to talk to the drive. And with this the cost of secure storage goes up significantly And then you have to look at the
journey of where it’s got to go. You want to make sure that if the drive doesn’t get to its intended destination that no one else is able to get the material (thinking about some of the headline studio leaks that have cost huge fortunes in lost revenue). Another challenge with encrypted
media is password management - how you actually deal with locking and unlocking that media. A lot of the time you need a password either at the software level or you put a pin number
“The ARMORLOCK
architecture is a technology that
G-Technology are going to build
around. This is a change the post
industry has been waiting for but hasn’t had the technology or the right tools to be able to implement it. Until now.”
on the physical drive. How do you securely give out those pin numbers and ensure that nobody else can use those pin numbers? And how do you keep track of every pin number for every drive moving around between typically a dozen or so people? And then manage that across dozens of jobs? It can be a logistical nightmare.
Until now The beauty of the ARMORLOCK
approach is that you don’t need any specialist hardware and it’s not running off mains. WDC have come up with a really interesting system where no pin numbers are physically shared with anyone. You can send an encrypted package from a mobile phone or via app or via email and allow someone else to unlock the drive, or you can even unlock it remotely. There’s no need to share passwords or create a unique password for each user. You can track when that drive or
where that drive was last used with geographical tagging. At a facility level it’s ideal if you know where the drives are and who has access, and even be able to remotely remove access to that drive once it’s out in the world.
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