FREE Full Hard Drive Encryption
So there you are at Starbucks sipping on your latte, and surfing on their incredibly high priced wi-fi with your brand new Alienware laptop thinking to yourself, “Self! This is a mighty good latte!”.A few minutes later, you slip into a latte induced coma (Work
with me here.)
After about an hour or two you wake up with foam and cinnamon all over your face, and a splitting headache, but that isn’t the trouble. The trouble is that someone snatched your new Alienware laptop with all of your sensitive personal information (edit: a 24esque – mission impossible attempt in your stories to friends and family. We know how it goes. Que up the theme music).Stuff like bank information, passwords, etc! No biggie right? I mean you have a pretty good password.
Seriously, who is going to guess banana12 right?
With FREE software available on the internet, you can boot up to a CD and browse files, or even change the administrators password on your laptop. Then all of your sensitive information becomes their sensitive information which they will use to take you for everything you are worth (It’s called Identity Theft, look into it).
Well, the bad guys can’t get to your information if you take stronger precautions to secure your data. One of the best ways you can do that is with full hard drive encryption. And lucky for you, I have tested a FREE software that can do it.
CompuSec is a free security suite that among many other things, encrypts your hard drive (including the operating system) using a fast 256bit AES encryption. When the bad guys try to look at your files, all they see is a blank hard drive.
So lets go back to our scenario then, the bad guy got your laptop, but you encrypted it using CompuSec… The joke is on him! Actually, that isn’t true, he now has your $4000 Alienware laptop, but at least he doesn’t have your personal information and you won’t end up on Dateline’s “To Catch an ID Thief.”
Posted By El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power
June 28, 2007 - 12:23 pm
I will be installing this on my home pc and my laptop today.
Grassy ass!
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June 28, 2007 - 12:25 pm
Very informative post but to play devils advocate – can you bypass this encryption scheme to get to your files?
Is there ANY possibility this will frag my machine and destroy my data?
I might grab an older laptop and give this a try – how long does it take?
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June 28, 2007 - 1:15 pm
Yeah…About that…No
You better pray your hard drive doesn’t crash. Make sure to make frequent back-ups
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June 28, 2007 - 1:28 pm
I forgot to answer the “how long” question. It takes a long friggin’ time for the encryption process. On my Toshiba Tecra it took about 6 hours. Make sure you have plenty of time.
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June 28, 2007 - 1:36 pm
does this require you enter a password when you logon?
6 hours?? Ouch i might just wait till late tonight to mess with it.
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June 28, 2007 - 1:58 pm
6+hrs to encrypt…might have to wait on doing that….
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June 28, 2007 - 4:57 pm
Wait a minute….
I know your password now
banana12!
:)
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June 28, 2007 - 5:20 pm
Karl: Yes, it prompts you with a password at boot up. If you enter it correctly it will hand off to the operating system. When you set it up you configure a pin number as well so if you forget your password you can reset it. If you forget both, you are hosed.
Yeah, sorry about the long encryption time thing. it is good to set it right before bed time, then wake up and have it be finished.
banana12?!?! Not even close, more like orange13…
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November 24, 2007 - 6:17 pm
I think I still prefer using TrueCrypt and creating a container or partition for sensitive documents.
Of course, that’s for desktop use. For a laptop full drive encryption may be more useful.
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November 24, 2007 - 8:38 pm
Is TrueCrypt free?
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November 24, 2007 - 9:46 pm
Yes, TrueCrypt is free.
http://www.truecrypt.org/
It is available for Windows and Linux and you can actually open a TrueCrypt container created on one platform on the other. The encryption is totally on-the-fly, so no unencrypted data ever exists except in RAM.
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November 24, 2007 - 9:56 pm
@PD – how long does it take to encrypt?
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November 24, 2007 - 11:40 pm
I think it will make the computer run slower, because of the decoding needed to access each part of data.
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November 25, 2007 - 9:02 am
@Karl – It can take quite a while. You can’t use TrueCrypt to encrypt the boot partition, so typically you’re not doing the whole disk.
That being said, I encrypted a 250 Gig external drive I use for backups and I remember it taking about 24 hours. Sure, it’s a long time, but you only have to do it once.
@QW – Any encryption will add additional processing time, but I don’t find it noticeable. Besides, if you need the benefits and protection of encryption, that’s the price you pay.
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November 26, 2007 - 2:37 am
Can’t argue with the price, but the added processing time is something I wouldn’t look forward to.
I used Ceelox a while back when I was taking a notebook to work everyday (I was a programmer and database admin, and needed to work from several locations). It worked in conjunction with the fingerprint scanner on my ThinkPad and there was no noticable lag when accessing the encrypted files.
That said, I’ve recently made the switch to Ubuntu at home and haven’t found any decent encrypted storage vaults. I might just give this one a try :)
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November 26, 2007 - 2:37 am
Can’t argue with the price, but the added processing time is something I wouldn’t look forward to.
I used Ceelox a while back when I was taking a notebook to work everyday (I was a programmer and database admin, and needed to work from several locations). It worked in conjunction with the fingerprint scanner on my ThinkPad and there was no noticable lag when accessing the encrypted files.
That said, I’ve recently made the switch to Ubuntu at home and haven’t found any decent encrypted storage vaults. I might just give this one a try :)
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November 26, 2007 - 3:30 pm
Thanks Jason and nice site. Let us know how it goes!
We might be able to help you out get at me info at asktheadmin dot com. Where are you from?
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November 26, 2007 - 11:24 pm
Regarding the performance hit from on-the-fly encryption.
In a completely unscientific test, I copied a single 700 Meg file from one partition on my drive to another. It took 30 seconds.
Then I created a 1 Gig Truecrypt file and copied the same file into the encrypted container. It took 39 seconds. Copying the file from the Truecrypt container to an unencrypted location also took 39 seconds.
So, yes on-the-fly encryption does appear to create a performance hit, but for sensitive data, I’m more than willing to make that tradeoff.
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November 26, 2007 - 11:46 pm
im sold. i will report back as well. thanks pd
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