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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 t…
Out of curiosity: If the FBI or NSA REALLY wanted to get the data on your hard drive, is Truecrypt enough to keep them out?
Fortunately for our collective sanity, if it is the case that NSA has (several times over) the moral equivalent of the "stack overflow" for cryptosystems, there is nothing we can do about it, and there's no point wanking over alternatives that might foil them.
Regarding the FBI, "almost certainly yes", assuming you use it properly (in particular, by using strong secrets). Consider that any vulnerability in the crypto stack Truecrypt uses would have far too much value to be wasted on conventional domestic law enforcement. Consider also that unlike state secrets, domestic law enforcement uses a crypto stack that is the same or strictly weaker than Truecrypt.
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.
It's hard to predict what data is going to end up being sensitive, and it's hard to predict where that data is going to end up being stored. By way of example, you haven't protected any of the session cookies stored in your browser; another user, following your advice, could lose their Google Mail account and then quickly thereafter the accounts of anything with an email password reset.
If you (a) don't keep a lot of sensitive information around and (b) are prepared to be extremely careful on a daily basis about keeping your laptop clean, yours is a workable strategy. If, like some of us, your desktop tends to get cluttered or your mail spool tends to grow without bound or your hard drive tends to mysteriously fill up over the year, you're better off with full-disk encryption.
Out of curiosity: If the FBI or NSA REALLY wanted to get the data on your hard drive, is Truecrypt enough to keep them out?
There are some things to keep in mind though:
Fine print: As others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread, it's possible to extract encryption keys from RAM even if the computer has been (very... within several minutes) recently shut down.
More fine print: Pick a weak passphrase, and you may be shit-outta-luck. Also, brute forcing for passphrases up to a certain complexity is viable.
Tin foil hat: A conspiracy theorist may assert that the feds are far ahead of academia when it comes to cryptography, as was likely the case several decades ago (see the history of DES). I'm not sure that I believe that, because cryptography has a huge place in academia now, worldwide. It's possible, but I doubt they've broken AES.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In some cases you can use a pair of pruning shears to cut the plastic on the kensington lock slot, then take the laptop. It's usually plastic (although some laptops do use high tension steel these days)
I don't think anyone expects the lock to thwart a dedicated attacker. But the most common case of laptop stealing is someone wanting a new laptop, not your specifically. Your laptop just has to look harder to steal.
Out of curiosity: If the FBI or NSA REALLY wanted to get the data on your hard drive, is Truecrypt enough to keep them out?
Probably. As far as anybody knows, the FBI and NSA are on the same level of cryptography technology as the rest of the world is. AES and SHA-1 are currently the national standards for encryption and secure hashing. AES is what TrueCrypt uses (as do most SSL connections and WPA/WPA2 connections). There are some things to keep in mind though: Fine print: As others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread, it's possible…
I responded to this same comment with more details that I won't repeat, but, with respect, I'd suggest not taking seriously the crypto insights of someone who equates these two agencies.
The fact that only one organization in the US Government is likely to be able to break your disk encryption isn't a moot point, because that one organization is extremely unlikely to harass a US citizen; forget the law, the simple incentives are all wrong.
OS X has FileVault which encrypts the home folder. I don't think I have any personal data outside of it. But I do use TrueCrypt too.
Also it breaks the Time Machine browser. If you want to do a restore, you must mount the data backup manually and find the file(s) you want to restore through Finder. Definately not elegant or very user friendly.
Some apps do have minor glitches with FileVault. IIRC, Firefox wouldn't remember certain settings if you used it with a FileVault-enabled account (not sure if this has changed in recent versions).
Out of curiosity: If the FBI or NSA REALLY wanted to get the data on your hard drive, is Truecrypt enough to keep them out?
Regarding the NSA, "who knows", it's not worth any time to speculate. I tend to think the answer here is "no", but not because of any fundamental problem with the algorithms TC uses; rather, I assume there's a small battery of implementation errors NSA can exploit that private industry hasn't yet independently discovered. Fortunately for our collective sanity, if it is the case that NSA has (several times over) the m…
You need to add "assuming you are willing to go to jail" because a warrant can compel you to disclose your password, and if you refuse you'll be jailed for contempt of court.
* Encrypt the user data portion of the hd.
* Password protect the bios, hard drive (if it has that capability in the bios.), and the OS accounts.
* Keep account passwords and account information in an additional password protected store (such as 1password).
* Don't save sensitive data in web browsers or other autocomplete programs.
Encrypting the whole hard drive, in my experience, is a huge pain in the ass; particularly for disaster recovery. For non-IT department systems it's not worth it.