<quote who="Hagen, Eric">
Speaking of TrueCrypt, a bruteforce attack is totally out of the question
at this point. Any of the three cyphers in use will make the data
irrelevantly hard to crack using sheer computing power. the only reason
to even bother with the three-cypher is if the data will still be relevant
in 20-40 years, when the technology to crack any single cypher *might* be
available. However, this would also require a mathematical breakthrough,
as the current state of encryption is not just a few orders of magnitude
away from being broken, but dozens of orders of magnitude.
That is good to know. And totally changes my point of view. After
reading a few other responses, I've also decided the full disk encryption
is the only thing that will help me.
As for the use of a hidden partition, this is really only useful for
plausable deniability. Creating a hidden partition within a real
partition allows the user to give up a passphrase under interrogation or
otherwise, and have that passphrase be valid and decrypt some data.
Unless your employees are likely to be kidnapped and compelled to disclose
their passphrase, the hidden partition does little for your security. You
can, however, use any random filename buried within the file structure
c:\windows\system32\arrgh.not is just as valid a filename as any other as
far as truecrypt is concerned, but having a 10GB file floating around
would be pretty obvious to a would-be attacker, so this really only useful
for small amounts of data.
My (flawed) idea was that I could auto-mount the encrypted partition on
boot that only required a pass phrase. Then the user would manually mount
the hidden partition when needed. I thought this would throw an attacker
off thinking that if they got the passphrase, they had all the data that
is to be gotten from the laptop.
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