Data encryption

[WLeg]

I've decided to purchase a new laptop....which will travel, not just sit on the desk.

Has anyone got experiance of PGP Full Disk Encryption ?

http://uk.store.pgp.com/desktop_pro.html

I'm interested in any performance hit, and ease of use info, more real life than the press release.

 

[jpm993]

Hello, yes I use PGP.

It's very easy to use, typically I don't use this on every e-mail, only those which need encryption. Also, if you use a Windows Mobile device to collect your mail, it can't decrypt.

Using the virtual disk (encryption) is very easy, also "disc shredding / file shredding" works really well, although disc shredding takes a lot of time and should be run overnight.

Let me know if you have any other questions, happy to help.

 

[Sp!ke]

Expect about a 15% hit in performance for disk intensive tasks. On a dual core PC this is no problem but if you're still running a single core PC, you'll feel the hit and you might want to consider upgrading or simply encrypting your data rather than the whole disk.

You might even just want to consider EFS, as a cheap solution (expensive doesnt mean better).

Whatever you choose, its now possible to recover the all important keys from volitile memory under certain conditions. Bitlocker has been broken now too.

It used to be that the attack involved cooling off your target's RAM and yanking it to get a bitdump. Now you can boot the target machine off a USB flash drive and dump the contents of the ram onto the key without altering its contents.

All rather worrying if you've got particularly sensitive data as nothing it seems can be guaranteed to keep your data safe, you're increasing your chances sure but if someone really wants that data, they might find a way.

Good article here

 

[jpm993]

The best way to keep your data safe is to store on a personal external drive. I have a 160G Seagate which also uses an application to allow you to use I.E on any host machine without leaving a trace of the sites that you went to or downloaded from. You can also use Outlook or any other application like Skype etc, without leaving any personal data either.

Keeping your PGP keys on a seperate harddrive (USB pen etc) also ensure that no-one can retrieve them.

PGP will also allow you to shred any free space (normally where deleted files are left) on your hard drive to Military standard, so unless you have some really nasty bad guys trying to hack your machine, you should be pretty much OK.