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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?"
I am looking at an open source product for Windows, Mac, UNIX, as well as portable hard drives ...
I think you're going to find most people advising you to choose TrueCrypt which boasts:
I think they're on version 6.1a and I have been impressed with them. You may want to try benchmarking the various encryption algorithms it offers.
... but i am concerned about overhead and speed penalties.
Aren't we all. I mean, no one wants an Office Space like scenario where every day before you leave you have to wait for the damn little bar to cross the screen to save your progress for the day. You have another option which is to wait until the drive manufacturers build all that into the hardware's firmware so that it is as fast as they can make it.
... I also would feel very uneasy if someone assured me they had a method to do that. Drive encryption is one of those seemingly trivial but necessary reasons why companies have many system administrators and not some automagical solution.
I wouldn't recommend waiting that long, however.
Here's my formal suggestion: do a small test on a few users or even a few devices no one depends on, some USB drives, etc. Use them yourself and see what kind of overhead (for both user and device) we're talking about here. Then weigh that with how much comfort you get with universally encrypting everything. If A is greater than B (with a sinister sounding name like 'Dark Neuron' who knows?), draft up a plan. Otherwise, just wait until you have the funds to upgrade the hard drives to those with the built in encryption.
I do not know for certain but I do not believe there is a painless push-across-the-network way to do this
My work here is dung.
I've heard that full fs encryption on higher end computers has a negligible performance impact (cpu can generally keep up with the hdd) but on lower end machines esp. netbooks, the performance impact can be appreciable. Here is an article with benchmarks
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Hard drive encryption isn't meant to protect against social engineering attacks. It's meant to protect against attacks that don't require social engineering, like stealing or cloning a database server's drives for the information. More than anything, it's meant to provide reasonable assurance that if one of your employees' computers gets stolen by a common thief who just wants to sell it for the cash value, somebody else down the line won't be able to read the data in the drive and take advantage of it.
Are you adequate?
There's a huge difference. When you see numbers like "128-bit," you're dealing with a symmetric encryption algorithm (e.g., AES). When you see numbers like "4096-bit," you're dealing with an asymmetric algorithm (e.g., RSA).
See the NIST Recommendation for Key Management (PDF), page 63. For example, to get RSA that is "equivalently" secure (for some predicted meaning of equivalent) to AES-128, you need a 3072-bit key. The table is explained on page 62.
As an aside, the comparably small key sizes that asymmetric elliptic curve cryptograph (ECC) can use, illustrated on page 63, are one of the reasons that ECC is so valuable.