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GBDE-GEOM Based Disk Encryption on FreeBSD

Posted by michael on from the as-long-as-men-are-capable-of-evil dept.

BSD Forums writes "The ever increasing mobility of computers has made protection of data on digital storage media an important requirement in a number of applications and situations. GBDE is a strong cryptographic facility for denying unauthorised access to data stored on a 'cold' disk for decades and longer. GBDE operates on the disk(-partition) level allowing any type of file system or database to be protected. A significant focus has been put on the practical aspects in order to make it possible to deploy GBDE in the real world. FreeBSD's Poul-Henning Kamp says in an email to freebsd-current that he has uploaded this paper and slides which he presented at BSDcon 2003, California, USA."

2 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Again someone reinvents Theo's ideas. by Krapangor · · Score: -1, Flamebait
    Come on, OpenBSD had transparent slice encryption for years. Again someone reinvents stuff in FreeBSD which is in OpenBSD for a long time already. And of course with strong encryption.
    You could have had this already by just replacing your FreeBSD install with OpenBSD and you would have get the protection from remote exploits as an additional bonus. Partition encryption is pretty useless if your box is owned.

    The only issue with OpenBSD is it's lacking support for AES. But the are some issues with AES itself: (1) the thing that one shuffle gives the same strength as three and (2) it's officially approved by the NSA. So it's rather unlikely that this is a really strong encryption scheme with flaws or backholes.

    --
    Owner of a Mensa membership card.
  2. Some little known facts about the devil's OS... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    1. You can not play games on it.
    2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
    3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
    4. There is no support available for it.
    5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
    6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
    7. You have to compile everything and know C.
    8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
    9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
    10.It is dying.