That means it's essentially useless for protecting in real time real-world conversations. The real-time capability is where the project seemingly has made a breakthrough: while speech-masking algorithms aren't new, they've typically needed to hear an entire recording to obscure it.
It's quiet – just above a whisper – but can generate sound specifically modeled to obscure speech in real time so that conversations can't be transcribed by software and acted upon or the text sent back to some remote server for processing. Rather, this is a system designed to stop devices equipped with microphones from transmitting automatically transcribed recordings.
This technology won't necessarily stop a human listener from understanding someone if they're snooping (you can give recordings a listen and view the source code at the link above). The thought that our gadgets are spying on us isn't a pleasant one, which is why a group of Columbia University researchers have created what they call "neural voice camouflage." We encourage all security researchers to responsibly report potential security vulnerabilities or concerns to WD Customer Service and Support at. We highly value and encourage this kind of responsible community engagement because it ultimately benefits our customers by making our products better. "We continue to evaluate the observations. "WD has been in a dialogue with independent security researchers relating to their security observations in certain models of our My Passport hard drives," spokeswoman Heather Skinner told The Register in a statement. Next, you can drag the WD Drive Security icon. To use it, you will first have to close the current version of the WD Drive Utilities. The software is compatible with macOS 12 Monterey/macOS 11 Big Sur/macOS 10.15 Catalina/macOS 10.14 Mojave. Meanwhile, Western Digital says it is on the case. One of the easiest ways to unlock a WD external hard drive is by using the WD Drive Utilities for Mac. This paper on WD self-encrypting drives has to be read to be believed. It must be stressed that the flaws are in WD's software running on these microcontrollers, rather than the chips themselves.
Drive models using a JMicron JMS569 controller – which is present in newer My Passport products – can be forcibly unlocked using commercial forensic tools that access the unencrypted system area of the drive, we're told.ĭrives using a Symwave 6316 controller store their encryption keys on the disk, encrypted with a known hardcoded AES-256 key stored in the firmware, so recovery of the data is trivial.