Fwd: Encrypting laptops ?

[Maitland Bottoms]

For the last 5 years the debian-installer has made it easy
to set up systems with only a small boot area unencrypted.

So I've been setting up systems with encrypted disk, and
in use I can't say as I notice any performance degradation.
My guess is with today's mutli-threaded CPUs there's always
enough crypto-calculating hardware to keep up with the disk
while your apps use other threads. I am surprised it isn't
more mainstream to have systems work this way by default.
Especially with laptops.

But there's a lot I don't know about this subject, and
Wikipedia has organized it under the heading
"Comparison of disk encryption software"[1].

The Ironkey seems to be a great tool. But for general
cheap USB storage and even for "tote-able" USB/Firware
hard disks I generally format those as LUKS[2] devices.

The nice think is I can use the LUKS formatted encrypted
thumb drives on my Linux systems and share them with
Windows users who use FreeOTFE[3].

Making life harder for the cryptanalyst involves filling
the media with random data. I've had systems spend several
days sitting around gathering enough entropy to fill a
1TB disk. Perhaps I need some more entropy: anyone use
something like the USB Entropy Key[4]?


These online data storage services look interesting.
I heard _today_ that Livedrive makes backups to paper:
http://blog.livedrive.com/tag/barcode-backup/

-Maitland

notes:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_disk_encryption_software
[2] http://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/
[3] http://www.freeotfe.org/
[4] http://www.entropykey.co.uk/