Hackers will be unable to attack Web sites protected by a new
security system unless they can change the laws of physics,
according to Naoto Takano, chief executive officer of Japanese
company Scarabs.
Scarabs claims that it has developed a hard disk drive (HDD) with
two heads that prevents disk files published on the Web from being
altered by hackers.
Scarabs put two heads on a HDD, a read-only head that is connected
via one cable to a Web server for people to browse content on the
disk file and a read/write head that is connected by another cable
to a PC for administrators who renew the data.
Internet users have access to the disk file only through the
read-only head and so there is no physical way they can go into the
system and rewrite the data.
The original idea of a HDD having two heads emerged around 1985,
when Takano was a scientific researcher. Analysis of data took a
long time because all the data needed to be written to a drive
before it could be read out again. Takano realised that if the HDD
was fitted with a read-only head, which could start reading data
for analysis while the read/write head was still writing data on
the disk, analysis could be done faster. At that time, however, the
idea was never implemented.
"I realised about three to four years ago that this could be used
for server system security on the Internet," Takano said.
The company succeeded in making a prototype last December. Since
then, it has been showing real-time video streaming images on the
Web.
In the prototype, each head works independently and, as long as
both the Internet server and the internal company PC are running
operating systems that can read the same disk format, it could run
on any operating system, Takano said.
Scarabs' prototype works on Windows NT4.0 CD-ROM running ASP
(Active Server Pages) and IIS (Internet Information Services),
Takano said.
It costs around ¥100,000 (£547) to build the simplest version of
this system, Takano said.
Scarabs is also working on a different version of the technology --
instead of putting two heads on a HDD, the company is connecting
two SCSI interface circuits to a conventional HDD with one head,
one set to send read-only electronic signals and the other to send
read/write signals.
"From an end user's point of view, the electronic implementation is
more complicated but the professionals and vendors are more
interested in this method. We have approached three vendors so far
and hopefully, will be able to start sample shipping within this
year," Takano said.