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Hardware Encryption - It’s About Time

Wow, talk about overdue! Don’t get me wrong here, I think it is fantastic that we will finally see some data protection happening at the hardware level so that when some bonehead loses a laptop full of customer data, the world is not going to come to an end.

Here’s the rub though. The Trusted Drive Manager software is a Windows only concept. Again, if it works, then fantastic. But with growth being shown on other platforms, I would love to see something like this be made available for Linux as well; understanding that it would be closed source.

But looking to the bright side of things, I am hopeful that this will dawn a new era of common sense with regard to taking our critical data into the wilds of the general public, only to abruptly lose it. I remain confident that lost laptops will remain a common theme, however if technology like hardware encryption can create some sort of idiot-proof buffer protecting those who have no choice in their data being lost, then I for one will be grateful.

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What Do You Think?

marc klink - April 5, 2007 @ 6:39 am

Just an observation…how many computer users really need whole drive encryption? My guess is not many, perhaps 1 in 25.

Kurt Koppang - April 5, 2007 @ 7:43 am

While I agree that data encryption for portable data, laptops, external drives, etc. is essential to protect sensitive data there is no requirement for it to be closed source. If you are going to implement a hardware based encryption then the authentication portion must take place prior to boot and should be OS independent. If the authentication takes place after boot then it is vunerable to the same attacks as the OS. The management software would only be as secure as the OS it is running on. The security through obscurity model has been proven faulty. The problem is it depends on people to keep the code obscure and we all know that “leaks” and reverse engineering happen. With the improved security in Vista and the more granular security controls in some versions of Linux it should be possible to get control software that can stand up to a little scutiny.

What are your thoughts?

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