This is obfuscation, rather than encryption, for all purposes.
Major hardware vendors are involved, and «the issue is worse on Windows». No surprises, then… Glad I don’t use that poor excuse for an operating system… 🙂
It seems a few popular devices with hardware controlled self encryption aren’t really doing it good by having master passwords (truly a #WTF) and faulty standards implementations.
«SSDs from Micron (Crucial) and Samsung are affected. These are SSDs that support hardware-level encryption via a local built-in chip, separate from the main CPU. Some of these devices have a factory-set master password that bypasses the user-set password, while other SSDs store the encryption key on the hard drive, from where it can be retrieved. The issue is worse on Windows, where BitLocker defers software-level encryption to hardware encryption-capable SSDs, meaning user data is vulnerable to attacks without the user’s knowledge»
There’s a paper with all the gory details for the hard core guys and a report on ZDNet for the rest.