Hard Disk Guard Based Policy Enforcement

The Hard Disk Guard is a security peripheral that is retrofitted to a Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS)hard disk. The Hard Disk Guard can enforce policies that substantially enhance an enterprise´s security posture. Widely distributing the Hard Disk Guard provides a mechanism for efficiently administering and enforcing security policies on large networks. A transparent file system is described that can make use of the Hard Disk Guard to enforce a coarse-grained security policy on a system configuration. A roll-back mechanism maintains a baseline configuration across system reboots, whilst providing flexibility over the configuration during any particular session. This feature is useful in training environments, Internet cafés, military computing environments, and managed enterprise networks. The Hard Disk Guard can be remotely managed utilising a novel in-band communications mechanism.