Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Year's Resolution: Full Disk Encryption on Every Computer You Own

eff.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 187 posts

Re: New Year's Resolution: Full Disk Encryption on Every Computer You Own

#91

Post by bonzoesc »

spacemanaki wrote: post #80
buro9 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is what we thought was happening with Dropbox and why people were up in arms about discovering that it wasn't the case. There remains the space for a cloud sync service that encrypts client side and provides good enough clients for every major platform. Spider Oak comes close, but it's just too damn ugly an interface and isn't the "Install and forget" option that Dropbox is.

Who thought that was happening with Dropbox? Did they ever make the claim that they would encrypt people's data?

https://www.dropbox.com/features claims "Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and AES-256 bit encryption," and I truly do believe they encrypt.

However, I also know that since their website allows me to access data and reset my password, their key management doesn't prevent Dropbox employees from viewing my stuff.

Re: New Year's Resolution: Full Disk Encryption on Every Computer You Own

#92

Post by morsch »

buro9 wrote: post #78
morsch wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is, of course, to store your data online and encrypt it.

Which is what we thought was happening with Dropbox and why people were up in arms about discovering that it wasn't the case. There remains the space for a cloud sync service that encrypts client side and provides good enough clients for every major platform. Spider Oak comes close, but it's just too damn ugly an interface and isn't the "Install and forget" option that Dropbox is.

I use Wuala. I think their software is pretty nice; don't know how it compares to SpiderOak since I've never used it. They encrypt client-side. Employees can't access data. Or so they say, since the client isn't open source, which is my main hangup.

If I understand correctly, it's not as secure/confidential as Spider Oak: the encryption key for file A is Hash(A) and your own key is only used to gain access to Hash(A) in order to decrypt the files. This lets them deduplicate more efficiently on their end, but it also means they can determine if two users have the same file. It also has some other repercussions (there is a HN story about it). It's still a lot better than DropBox, though.

Re: New Year's Resolution: Full Disk Encryption on Every Computer You Own

#93

Post by there »

marquis wrote: post #81
tobiasbischoff wrote: post #8

On OSX with Lion - there is no excuse http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/10/filevault-2-benchmarks-disk-e...

Filevault isn't supported by the major media editing apps. I travel a lot and rely on having a 'fake' account on my drive that I can login to if asked that has pretty much nothing on it.

you must be thinking of the original filevault that encrypted each user's home directory separately.

filevault 2 in lion is true full-disk encryption, and the passphrase must be entered at boot. once it is decrypted, no application should even be able to detect (or rather, care about) the presence of encryption.

Re: New Year's Resolution: Full Disk Encryption on Every Computer You Own

#94

Post by wazoox »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #17
wazoox wrote: post #13

None of my current computers is powerful enough for that without it being a serious hassle. And I'm pretty sure it will drain my laptop battery much faster...

Which OS do you use? On Mac OS X I use Knox; my 2006' MBP doesn't have any issue with that.

I'm running Linux everywhere, and Snow Leopard on my MacBook. I find the MacBook a bit slow at time (mostly because of the 2GB RAM I guess). I still use an ancient Athlon64 single core with 1GB as my main desktop, though :)

Re: New Year's Resolution: Full Disk Encryption on Every Computer You Own

#95

Post by Cyranix »

dlytle wrote: post #88
finnw wrote: post #85

I am not convinced by one of the quiz answers: > Our calculations confirm that a relatively short series of truly randomly chosen English dictionary words is secure; many people find these somewhat more memorable. Above we used "In the jungle! The mighty Jungle, the lion sleeps tonight!" The important thing is to choose enough words and to choose them in a random un-guessable way, such as by changing the spacing, pun…

The point is that "In the jungle" etc can actually be reliably remembered by a large portion of the population, whereas 16 independently chosen letters/numbers/symbols usually can not. Humans are great at remembering phrases, quotes, etc. Think about how widespread referential humor is, where the joke is just a reference to/quote from another work. That's something the brain is great at. Random or semi-random jumbles…

In illustrated fashion: http://xkcd.com/936/

Re: New Year's Resolution: Full Disk Encryption on Every Computer You Own

#96

Post by spacemanaki »

bonzoesc wrote: post #91
spacemanaki wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who thought that was happening with Dropbox? Did they ever make the claim that they would encrypt people's data?

https://www.dropbox.com/features claims "Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and AES-256 bit encryption," and I truly do believe they encrypt. However, I also know that since their website allows me to access data and reset my password, their key management doesn't prevent Dropbox employees from viewing my stuff.

Fair enough, I didn't really think that comment through.

Re: New Year's Resolution: Full Disk Encryption on Every Computer You Own

#97

Post by wazoox »

sitkack wrote: post #32
wazoox wrote: post #13

None of my current computers is powerful enough for that without it being a serious hassle. And I'm pretty sure it will drain my laptop battery much faster...

It looks like many people assume this to be so but haven't done the benchmarks. FDE is going to be a much smaller hit than say anti-virus software. Encryption routines have been highly optimized into the multi gigabytes per second range.

> FDE is going to be a much smaller hit than say anti-virus software.

But I don't run any anti-virus, this is even one of the good reasons why I stopped using windows aeons ago. I tried LUKS with AES a few years ago, and though the performance was good it comes with a really significant hit.

Re: New Year's Resolution: Full Disk Encryption on Every Computer You Own

#98

Post by zurn »

jrgifford wrote: post #19

Unfortunately, the amount of time I spend running/breaking the development version of Ubuntu prohibits full disk encryption, but I do have /home encrypted. Is that "good enough"?

It's not reliable. Think /tmp (deleted temp file data can be recovered), hibernate/swap, log files, and so on. And OS can be more easily tampered with undetected (rootkits/keyloggers etc).

Re: New Year's Resolution: Full Disk Encryption on Every Computer You Own

#100

Post by quinndupont »

quinndupont wrote: post #99

Does anyone have any thoughts on Apple's File Vault? I assume the crypto is perfectly fine, but I worry about bugs destroying my data.

Apparently FileVault has been much improved in OS X Lion: http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_use_filevault_and_...
Post reply on HN