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Crypto Leash for Laptops?

Posted by michael on from the taking-my-vaio-for-a-walk dept.

timman999 writes "New Scientist reports a new device that will automatically encrypt all the data on a laptop when it is separated from its owner. It uses a small receiver and the user has to wear a transmitter on his wrist."

3 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't that backward? by sysadmn · · Score: 4, Informative
    My first thought reading the description was, "Wouldn't it be better to encrypt everything, and only DECRYPT when the user is in range?" Fortunately I read the article before posting (that'll get me modded down...)
    To speed up the encryption process, most of the files is already encrypted and only a cached portion is automatically decrypted when the user is in range. This means it takes around six seconds to encrypt and decrypt data.
    --
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  2. Article is somewhat wrong... by jbf · · Score: 4, Informative

    The data is always encrypted on the hard drive, and is only decrypted at the cache. So steal it, remove battery, submerge in liquid nitrogen is the only way to get even a little bit of data out of it. The really cute exploit is to tunnel their challenge/response over a network of some sort (say, cell phones), and just have someone follow the legitimate user around until all the information is decrypted.

    The research paper on this will be presented at ACM MobiCom 2002, the premier conference on wireless networks and such.

  3. Link to Paper by mcorner · · Score: 5, Informative

    As always it is difficult to discern the technical details of how a system works from a news article. If you are interested, I urge you to read the technical paper. My papers

    FYI, the data sits on the disk encrypted and in the page cache decrypted. Keep in mind this is a technical paper and a research prototype and not a product.