RSSFull Disk Encryption for notebooks launches in beta
By Tim Conneally | Published April 23, 2009, 10:45 AM
Security company Check Point Software has begun accepting testers for its ZoneAlarm Full Disk Encryption for Laptops beta program, a program designed to make sensitive data saved on notebooks more difficult to extract if the computer is stolen.
While Full Disk Encryption is turned on, the user must enter an additional password before Windows starts up. Once in Windows, the software encrypts unused files, including even deleted and temporary ones, and decrypts only the files currently in use.
Users of ZoneAlarm Extreme Security beta available in Fileforum will have to uninstall their prior version to be able to participate in this beta, and as usual, users are advised to only install this beta on test systems, because certain common practices (such as creating new partitions) can result in data loss.
Ok, this is a story becuase it is a new product. PERIOD.
It is nothing new, as any IT person that has worked in a field that mandates encrypted volumes. There are free to low fee solutions all around that will do what you want, and it is strange that Zone would even venture in this area, as they have kind of sucked for the last 4 years in what they were known to do best.
Go look at PGP solutions and yes BitLocker is a viable solution that is very safe.
The debate on BitLocker is silly, especially when you have trolls calling it 'less secure' because of things like needing USB boot keys on NON TPM machines.
Most computers made in the last 4 years have TPM, so this is fairly moot; however, having a boot USB key is not as much of a security risk as the people here try to make it out to be.
How is having USB boot abilities enabled going to reduce the security of a highly encrypted volume? Is that USB key with a magical version of Linux going to let you 'unecrypt' the volume, NOT HARDLY, unless you have a couple of years to break the encryption while you are at it.
Bitlocker in Win7 is more of an option, as it has an easier install for 'home' type users, and also does full encrptions on USB devices FAT and NTFS using the NTFS encyrption routines, so that you can even take data on your USB device that is encrpted and still even be able to use it under XP, which knows nothing of volume level encryption only NTFS selective encryption.
PS Encryption is NOT something to play around with for a goof, as you need to keep your keys and if in a corporate environement makes sure you have a Global Policy key, so that if Joe Smoo decides to rip off the company and do so by encyrpting his USB Stick, the corporate key will still allow access to it.
I have seen a lot of home usere not keep a key backup and then nuke their installationg, not realizing that even 'encrpted folders' on Windows are forever lost, as there is no corporate key global policy to save them and the data is NOT recoverable.
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|DiskCryptor - free open source full disk encryption solution
http://diskcryptor.net/index.php/DiskCryptor_en
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|BitLocker does a much better and secure job
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|Prey tell, How do you know it does a "much better and (more) secure job"?
Emotional assumptions are fun, but substantiated facts would be nicer.
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|And truecrypt does better than them all:open source and many, many options for encryption.
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|"The TrueCrypt Collective License does not meet the Open Source Definition, and thus has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative. It is considered "non-free" by all the major GNU/Linux distributions (Debian[12], Ubuntu[13], Fedora[14], openSUSE[15], Gentoo[16]). The Fedora project explains[17] that
The TrueCrypt software is under an extremely poor license, which is not only non-free, but actively dangerous to end users who agree to it, opening them to possible legal action even if they abide by all of the licensing terms. Fedora made extensive efforts to try to work with the TrueCrypt upstream to fix these mistakes in their license, but was unsuccessful. Fedora Suggests: Avoid this software entirely."
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|The history of Zone Alarm and their abominal support has me leary of using any Zone product.
And out of curiousity - but not sufficient enough that I should take the time to actually check it out - is the encryption AES or not?
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|Why worry about AES encryption when BitLocker uses TPM to encrypt your whole hard drive?
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|Because AES meets across the board security audit requirements in all circumstances be they ISO17799/20001, COBIT, or whatever framework you are working within.
And Bitlocker by default uses the AES encryption algorithm in CBC mode with a 128 bit key.
But not all machines use the TPM! Thus they must support the use of a USB based startup key in order to boot the protected OS.
You might note that this requires that the BIOS on the protected machine support the reading of USB devices in the pre-OS environment - which is a substantial potential security issue in itself!
There is more to this than simply what you are using on your own personal machine, despite some quite good individual tools available.
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