Encrypted filesystems solutions

I recommed reading the monthly CRYPTO-GRAM, it always has interesting stories from real life security, and not just IT related. Well worth subscribing to. It is often long, but a very good security round up of the month!

This month CRYPTO-GRAM had some nice reflections on disk encryption. Still relevant even after so many years of one story after another where personal data is lost, this latest is no exception!

So it should be no surprise that many people and companies still dont use disk encryption in some form or the other, but it is sad.

Some quotes:

Computer security is hard. Software, computer and network security are all ongoing battles between attacker and defender. And in many cases the attacker has an inherent advantage: He only has to find one network flaw, while the defender has to find and fix every flaw.
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There are several whole-disk encryption products on the market. I use PGP Disk's Whole Disk Encryption tool for two reasons. It's easy, and I trust both the company and the developers to write it securely. (Disclosure: I'm also on PGP Corp.'s Technical Advisory Board.)

Setup only takes a few minutes. After that, the program runs in the background. Everything works like before, and the performance degradation is negligible. Just make sure you choose a secure password -- PGP's encouragement of passphrases makes this much easier -- and you're secure against leaving your laptop in the airport or having it stolen out of your hotel room.

I am missing whole disk encryption on some of my computers, so i will look into that. On my Macbook i use Filevault.

There are other encryption programs out there. If you're a Windows Vista user, you might consider BitLocker. This program, embedded in the operating system, also encrypts the computer's entire drive. But it only works on the C: drive, so it won't help with external disks or USB tokens. And it can't be used to make encrypted zip files. But it's easy to use, and it's free. And many people like the open-source and free program, TrueCrypt. I know nothing about it.

I prefer TrueCrypt on Windows (didnt work on *nix when i tried a while back), having all sensitive data inside containers. On FreeBSD i use GEOM Based Disk Encryption (gbde) and EncFS.

An interesting twist and point to take note of, is if you are forced to type in your password. By authorities or criminals:

And some countries -- the United Kingdom, Singapore, Malaysia -- have passed laws giving police the authority to demand that you divulge your passwords and encryption keys.
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Failing that, you can try to convince the authorities that you don't have the encryption key. This works better if it's a zipped archive than the whole disk. You can argue that you're transporting the files for your boss, or that you forgot the key long ago. Make sure the time stamp on the files matches your claim, though.
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The best defense against data loss is to not have the data in the first place.

You really dont need to walk around with all kind of data, so dont!