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Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's hard disk?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's hard disk?

#81

Post by ax0n »

I don't encrypt my laptop's hard drive. Most of the files on my laptop are mundane: Photos, music, some documents. Everything on my laptop is important enough to back up, but not important enough that I'd care if they were published on the Internet, far and wide, much less if some attacker happened to get access to them. I don't store my passwords in my web browser, I don't click the "remember me" checkboxes when logging in to web sites. There really is nothing on my hard drive worth fretting over, and I go through great pains to keep it that way.

For stuff I consider sensitive -- medical documents, password lists, financials and the like, I store on a truecrypt partition of the external drive that I use for backups. Since I use OS X most often, this drive is a Time Machine drive, but with a chunk of space partitioned off for TrueCrypt. I opted to use a partition because it's less obvious than a container on the filesystem. I use TC's deniable filesystem trick as well, and padded the "duress volume" with things like "hacking" documents that might be plausible.

I also have an old 80GB laptop hard drive, which is fully-encrypted with a truecrypt volume, which I occasionally back up to from my primary TC volume. This drive is stored in a secure location off-site, in the hands of a trusted individual. They do not, however, have the passphrase to the volume.

The goal in all of this is so that I don't carry sensitive data with me. None of the encrypted stuff is anything I could possibly need RIGHT THIS SECOND. This means that my sensitive information is only at risk of being exposed when I'm at home and when I actually am accessing it.

Re: Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's hard disk?

#82

Post by esspem »

zmmmmm wrote: post #53

Question: for developers out there, what is the overhead of full encryption on your hard drive for a development laptop? I'd love to just go the whole hog and encrypt the whole drive, but as a developer I jealously guard performance as I feel it links directly to my productivity. So I just have an encrypted Truecrypt volume where really sensitive stuff goes. But I hear everyone recommending against that.

I use whole disk encryption since around 2005 and didn't have any performance problem.

The latest Truecrypt 7.0 uses AES-NI instructions in the i5 and i7 processors, which allegedly have 8x speed http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=hardware-acceleration

Go ahead and encrypt your whole drive, if there performance problems, you can easily de-encrypt it.

Re: Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's hard disk?

#83

Post by Cockbrand »

Cockbrand wrote: post #30
thibaut_barrere wrote: post #12

Yes I do (since a few months): - http://agilewebsolutions.com/knox (one vault per client) on Mac OS X, including all db data if any - http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password for all small-sized sensitive data (eg: production access, passwords etc), with an automated crypted backup I'm looking for a reliable and as seamless solution for Windows at my pace (not a big need). Something I'm also looking at is a wa…

There's a "securely erase free space" feature in Disk Utility, which does crash on me when I use it though, making a reboot necessary. Otherwise, you might simply use a one-liner like dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/free_space_eater; rm /tmp/free_space_eater This overwrites all unused space on the disk with zeroes. You'll temporarily run out of free diskspace with either option, so it's a good idea to do this when you're not…

Looking at it again, it's probably a good idea to extend that one-liner a little bit by throwing in a sync command, just to make sure that all zeroes get written to disk before deleting the fill-up file:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/free_space_eater; sync; rm /tmp/free_space_eater

Re: Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's hard disk?

#84

Post by gphil »

davidkk wrote: post #49
jeremy82 wrote: post #26

As a semi-professional nude photographer I have encrypted every hard disk I own, including my laptop's. It's part of my promise to the customers to keep their photos really safe. I am using Ubuntu and LuKs on all my machines because I find it very convenient to have a superb encryption mechanism built in. As a side note, I do all my picture editing in Gimp. While this is not commom among professional photographers, i…

I'm intrigued. Do you have some examples of your work?

I am too, not sure why you are being downvoted. I'm interested in finding out what a "landmark style" influenced by using gimp instead of photoshop looks like exactly.

Re: Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's hard disk?

#85

Post by mark_l_watson »

I just keep sensitive data on an encrypted volume and use soft links. Last year I wrote up how I do this for OS X: http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/10/securing-your-mac-laptop.... Really simple idea, works for me, and the relative amount of data I need encrypted is small.

Re: Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's hard disk?

#87

Post by rehtom »

- have to do full disk encryption - must have a great passphrase (according to NIST avg 8 char password has 2^18 bits of entropy, which compared to the keyspace of a 256 bit AES key is so very small...) the strength of the encryption is really based on the strength of the password - must also encrypt backups - what if you forget your password? (say at the border when they order you to decrypt it) - what if the license runs out? - if it's for work there needs to be another key to unlock it. - 2 factor auth would be great.

Re: Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's hard disk?

#88

Post by abalashov »

I would be much more concerned about laptop being arbitrarily seized at an airport by customs or TSA personnel, or by law enforcement otherwise, than it being stolen per se.

e.g.

http://www.daniweb.com/news/story218174.html

http://ezinearticles.com/?Business-Travel-Tip---Avoid-Having...

http://www.businesstravelnews.com/Business-Travel/Travel-Man...

You can lose a lot to thieves, but you can lose even more to state thuggery backed by the force of "law."

Re: Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's hard disk?

#89

Post by patio11 »

gphil wrote: post #84
davidkk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm intrigued. Do you have some examples of your work?

I am too, not sure why you are being downvoted. I'm interested in finding out what a "landmark style" influenced by using gimp instead of photoshop looks like exactly.

He is being down voted because the first comment of this throwaway account is a boorish redditism asked to someone who just said they value client confidentiality.
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