How To, When You Have To Encrypt Absolutely Everything?

Dark Neuron writes "My institution has thousands of computers, and is looking at starting an IT policy to encrypt everything, all hard drives, including desktops, laptops, external hard drives, USB flash drives, etc. I am looking at an open source product for Windows, Mac, UNIX, as well as portable hard drives, but I am concerned about overhead and speed penalties. Does anyone have experience and/or advice with encrypting every single device in a similar situation?"

Comments

Hard Drive Encryption - Theory vs. Reality

[Concern]

Let me explain to you how this works. In pictures:

http://xkcd.com/538/

Re:Hard Drive Encryption - Theory vs. Reality

[Sancho]

Of course, if you're using Truecrypt, they won't know when to stop hitting you.

Re:Hard Drive Encryption - Theory vs. Reality

[Rinisari]

Yeah...

Encryption will save your and your institution versus legal attacks, but if others' "people" may talk to your "people" with a wrench, then only iron will can save you.

Even biometrics can be fooled (e.g., eyeballs and fingers aren't that hard to remove these days).

Re:Hard Drive Encryption - Theory vs. Reality

[BrotherBeal]

eyeballs and fingers aren't that hard to remove these days

These days? Bodily mutilation is like the GEICO of injury - so easy, a caveman could do it.

ROT 26

[spike2131]

Tell the suits you are implementing state-of-the art ROT-26 encryption on everything. Take a month off. Come back, pronounce it complete, and ask for a raise.

Re:ROT 26

[Red Flayer]

That'll never work, it's too obvious. Even the PHBs recognize that there are 26 letters in the alphabet... that number may raise questions.

I suggest obfuscating it slightly, pardon the 'irregularities' of my math :)

ROT-26 Swap 2*13 for 26.
ROT-(2*13) Swap Triskadeca for 13
ROT-(2*Triskadeca) Swap Duplo for 2*
ROT-Duplotriskadeca Add Duplotriskadeca to both sides
ROT = Duplotriskadeca Eliminate
0 = Dupliskadeca Let d = 4; add 1 to each side
1 + 0 = Dupliska(4 + 1)eca = Dupliskaeeca Reorder
1 = cakeisadupel We know that l looks like 1, so go ahead and eliminate.
0 = cake is a dupe

The cake statement is a false, a lie!

Hence we can call this DoublePortal encryption, while knowing we maintained mathematical purity for the name.

Use of this naming convention for ROT(26) will surely be more amenable to the PHBs.

Re:Key Management

[starglider29a]

An elaborate system of Post It Notes (All ROT13'd)

Re:Have fun with management

[cs02rm0]

Maybe its just the corporate environment that I'm in and please I would love to be wrong. But from what I can tell a good number of open sourced products just don't scale up to the enterprise level.

There aren't any tools that manage them centrally and allow for compliance and auditing.

Crap. Has anyone told Google yet? Best get them to switch to Windows quickly!

Re:Key Management?

[MobyDisk]

To empower individuals to utilize synergistic approaches to achieve goals and exceed expectations. :)

PLAESE BACK UP FRIST!!!

[linhares]

Plase back everything up frist! Send it to us at editor@wikileaks.org and we'll store that data for you for free. We have mirror sites to protect the data; just send it before encrypting it.

Re:TrueCrypt or Wait for On Drive Upgrades

[Hal_Porter]

Coming from an Org that encrypts everything

Tom Cruise? Is that you?