Resisting the PGP Whole Disk Encryption Craze

alaederach writes "I run a lab in a non-profit academic life sciences research institute. Our IT recently decided it would be a good idea to use PGP whole disk encryption on all of our computers, laptops and servers and picked PGP's suite of software. The main reason is that a small subset of our researchers work with patient information which we obviously are mandated to keep confidential. My lab does a lot of high-performance computational work (on genes from Tetrahymena, no humans here) and I am concerned that the overhead of complying with our ITs new security policy will be quite detrimental to my research program. For example, dynamically reallocating a partition on a PGP encrypted disk is apparently not possible. Furthermore, there is some evidence that certain forms of compression are also incompatible with PGP whole disk encryption. Interestingly, it is hard to find any negative articles on PGP, probably because most of them are written by IT pros who are only focused on the security, and not usability. I therefore ask the Slashdot community, what are the disadvantages of PGP in terms of performance, Linux, and high-performance computational research?"

Comments

Suck it and see

[RationalRoot]

Get two identical machines. Put full disk encryption on one, run you app on both with the same dataset. Then you will know if it's worth kicking up a fuss over. Though if you can't do this little bit of research, I suspect genes may be a little complicated for you too.

out of control IT guys

[Thaelon]

When are the IT/network guys going to realize that among their job responsibilities are facilitating and enabling their users, not restricting them in new and inventive ways because it makes them feel useful, or is an excuse to exercise their authority. The job is to make our jobs faster, and easier. Security is secondary to getting the job done. And yes, secondary. Because if the business can't get work done, it doesn't get paid, if it doesn't get paid, it ceases to be rather quickly, and thus you don't have anything to secure.