Full Disk Encryption Evolves
Posted by
Greg Shipley and InformationWeek
September 28, 2009
Earlier this month, the Naval Hospital in Pensacola, Fla., began notifying thousands of individuals that personally identifiable information about them had been lost when a laptop disappeared. In August, the National Guard announced that a laptop containing personal information on 131,000 members had been stolen. We could go on--rarely does a month go by without an organization revealing the loss or theft of a laptop brimming with sensitive data.
Full disk encryption, or FDE, is the preferred mechanism to address this threat because, as the name implies, the technology lets IT encrypt the entire hard drive so that sensitive data is protected, no matter where it resides. But unfortunately, FDE adoption comes at a price: complex and costly deployments, additional licensing fees, and one more application for IT to support. Now, adoption of a new standard for hardware-based FDE, called Opal, aims to alleviate some of that pain.
No organization can plead ignorance of encryption options. Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux all have built-in support for file-system-level encryption. But while encrypting a file system, or providing an encrypted folder on an employee's laptop, is better than nothing, it still leaves too much to chance. Did the employee put all sensitive data into that target folder? Was anything left in caches or temporary directories? And perhaps most critical, without FDE, if a device is stolen or lost, how do you definitively know that all of the sensitive information it contained was encrypted?
Short answer: You don't.
Vendors including Check Point Software (via its PointSec acquisition), Guardian Edge, McAfee (via its Safeboot acquisition), and PGP offer software-based FDE suites that can help you avoid all these problems. With software-based FDE products, the data on the drive can only be accessed when the operating system is booted and the encryption keys unlocked. But the technology isn't perfect--software-based FDE also has drawbacks. First, a number of software FDE products don't support Linux or Mac OS X. Second, depending on the age and processing power of the laptop, the encryption process can slow down a machine. Finally, encryption keys are stored in the computer's memory, which makes them vulnerable to a class of so-called "cold boot" attacks, in which encryption keys are recovered in RAM.
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