So there you are at Starbucks sipping on your latte, and surfing on their incredibly high priced wi-fi with your brand new Alienware laptop thinking to yourself, “Self! This is a mighty good latte!”.A few minutes later, you slip into a latte induced coma (Work with me here.)
After about an hour or two you wake up with foam and cinnamon all over your face, and a splitting headache, but that isn’t the trouble. The trouble is that someone snatched your new Alienware laptop with all of your sensitive personal information (edit: a 24esque – mission impossible attempt in your stories to friends and family. We know how it goes. Que up the theme music). Stuff like bank information, passwords, etc! No biggy right? I mean you have a pretty good password. Seriously, who is going to guess banana12 right?
WRONG!
With FREE software available on the internet, you can boot up to a CD and browse files, or even change the administrators password on your laptop. Then all of your sensitive information becomes their sensitive information which they will use to take you for everything you are worth (It’s called Identity Theft, look into it).
Well, the bad guys can’t get to your information if you take stronger precautions to secure your data. One of the best ways you can do that is with full hard drive encryption. And lucky for you, I have tested a FREE software that can do it.
CompuSec is a free security suite that among many other things, encrypts your hard drive (including the operating system) using a fast 256bit AES encryption. When the bad guys try to look at your files, all they see is a blank hard drive.
So lets go back to our scenario then, the bad guy got your laptop, but you encrypted it using CompuSec… The joke is on him! Actually, that isn’t true, he now has your $4000 Alienware laptop, but at least he doesn’t have your personal information and you won’t end up on Dateline’s “To Catch an ID Thief.”
Originally Posted on Bauer-Power By El Di Pablo
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Recent Comments
November 24, 2007 at 10:17 pm
I think I still prefer using TrueCrypt and creating a container or partition for sensitive documents.
Of course, that’s for desktop use. For a laptop full drive encryption may be more useful.
November 25, 2007 at 12:38 am
Is TrueCrypt free?
November 25, 2007 at 1:46 am
Yes, TrueCrypt is free.
http://www.truecrypt.org/
It is available for Windows and Linux and you can actually open a TrueCrypt container created on one platform on the other. The encryption is totally on-the-fly, so no unencrypted data ever exists except in RAM.
November 25, 2007 at 1:56 am
@PD – how long does it take to encrypt?
November 25, 2007 at 3:40 am
I think it will make the computer run slower, because of the decoding needed to access each part of data.
November 25, 2007 at 1:02 pm
@Karl – It can take quite a while. You can’t use TrueCrypt to encrypt the boot partition, so typically you’re not doing the whole disk.
That being said, I encrypted a 250 Gig external drive I use for backups and I remember it taking about 24 hours. Sure, it’s a long time, but you only have to do it once.
@QW – Any encryption will add additional processing time, but I don’t find it noticeable. Besides, if you need the benefits and protection of encryption, that’s the price you pay.
November 26, 2007 at 6:37 am
Can’t argue with the price, but the added processing time is something I wouldn’t look forward to.
I used Ceelox a while back when I was taking a notebook to work everyday (I was a programmer and database admin, and needed to work from several locations). It worked in conjunction with the fingerprint scanner on my ThinkPad and there was no noticable lag when accessing the encrypted files.
That said, I’ve recently made the switch to Ubuntu at home and haven’t found any decent encrypted storage vaults. I might just give this one a try
November 26, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Thanks Jason and nice site. Let us know how it goes!
We might be able to help you out get at me info at asktheadmin dot com. Where are you from?
November 27, 2007 at 3:24 am
Regarding the performance hit from on-the-fly encryption.
In a completely unscientific test, I copied a single 700 Meg file from one partition on my drive to another. It took 30 seconds.
Then I created a 1 Gig Truecrypt file and copied the same file into the encrypted container. It took 39 seconds. Copying the file from the Truecrypt container to an unencrypted location also took 39 seconds.
So, yes on-the-fly encryption does appear to create a performance hit, but for sensitive data, I’m more than willing to make that tradeoff.
November 27, 2007 at 3:46 am
im sold. i will report back as well. thanks pd