Hi everyone, I've enjoyed reading your thoughts on this.
I think there are two potential approaches:
You can either try the modchip (disabling the signature checks/making them always return true, etc)
OR
(and I think this is likely to be easier but is much less flexible) clone an existing "genuine" DMS.
I've had no time to look at this but if I were wanting to secure a drive I'd probably take some kind of hash of the
unique characteristics of the drive I was "locking", e.g. manufacturer name/ID, drive serial number, BIOS version, etc (or a combination) and write it to the drive somewhere (possibly the "interesting" space before the partitions start, but who knows?) It would then be trivial for the Phatbox to read this hash, compare it with the expected value from the drive ID etc and then accept or reject...
It would be interesting to see the result of a sector copy of a DMS onto the SAME make/model/version of "normal" HD -
which has had its firmware hacked to return the same serial number etc as the "genuine" DMS. HD manufacturers release flash utilities/HD toolkits, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to dump a DMS firmware (disc BIOS) image and reupload it to a non-Phatnoise drive.
I'd like to have more time to look into this but at the moment real life is getting in the way...
If I were Phatnoise I would sell the empty DMS cases at say $50 a pop and release a signing util/development kit. It seems odd that a company should base its product on an open source solution yet take such a proprietary approach. I feel it stifles a lot of the enthusiasm for their product.
