I agree with Brad. We used Securedoc and encrypted 100 percent of our laptops,
and it went off without a hitch. Another division used Safeboot and had
similar results.
We found it to be less troublesome and less risky to encrypt the whole drive,
and we can say with 100% certainty that if a laptop is lost, the data was
encrypted. That's a nice feeling, and avoids a lot of uncomfortable
post-mortem questions from Sr management and Legal if one is lost.
Also, the data is not the only target - on pen tests I have stolen, trojaned,
and returned a laptop, then harvested passwords and other info from it.
My 2 cents - Do the whole disk.
BlackBerry service provided by Nextel
-----Original Message-----
From: "Brad Judy" <Brad.Judy@colorado.edu>
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2006 09:24:30
To:<focus-ms@securityfocus.com>
Subject: RE: Whole disk encryption
Why? You only need to protect the data not the whole OS. It
causes too many problems. I don't recommend creating a
headache for yourself when you only need to protect some data.
Yes, you only need to protect data, but can you guarantee that data is
only being written to the encrypted part of the disk? If the user can
readily write to a non-encrypted space, then you've lost much of the
benefit of the encryption because if a laptop is lost/stolen you can
only say "I'm pretty sure the data was encrypted". Check with your
legal department and see how they feel about "pretty sure". :-)
Brad Judy
ITS - UCB
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
