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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.
"Security" that gets in people's way is a security threat, because people will find a way to work around it, and be worse off because of it. Never try to lock down everything, or you'll have no control over what is compromised. Figure out what you really need to secure, and lock that down. Really. Trying to secure everything is a sure sign that someone lacks the knowledge to make security decisions.
What's your key management strategy?
You want TrueCrypt.
It's probably better than a hardware solution. They keep screwing up and snake-oiling the hardware ones, but you can audit TrueCrypt (and people have), and pre-boot authenticated system drive encryption is pretty much what you want.
As for speed... I don't know what you're worried about. AES-256-XTS (best-in-breed, the new standard, which TrueCrypt pioneered and uses) runs at over 150MB/sec in benchmark, and that's on one core. Your hard disk very probably doesn't run that fast.
All our machines are encrypted using similar means, and we've never experienced any problems with performance.
PGP's Whole Disk Encryption isn't as good - that kept stalling in kernel mode under XP, causing hiccups on lots of disk accesses; and eventually the driver bluescreened on every boot and there was absolutely no way we could get it back, which lost us terabytes of data... but TrueCrypt has caused us no such problems, and costs nothing. (If it worked with the leftover eTokens from our earlier PGP deployment, it'd be perfect.)
Of course, if you're using Truecrypt, they won't know when to stop hitting you.
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
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
I see this all the time and it always makes me cringe.
If you treat all data the same, it is impossible to convince users to treat any data differently from any other, and they will all default to "Sloppy", and you won't care because you'll be certain that the encryption is going to save your ass.
It is a much much better idea to have a very distinct line between secure and insecure, so that people have that distinction hammered into their heads every time they touch secure data. Otherwise, someone is going to get sloppy with their private key, and you're going to get exploited and never see it coming.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
you may want to only encrypt parts of your hard disk as encrypting the whole disk will impact performance.
Yeah, but if you're running Windows, be sure to get the swap file (depending on security concerns, maybe having Win zero the swap file at shutdown might be enough) and all that crap in Documents and Settings. If concerns run to file/folder names, don't forget the MRU lists. I do have a Truecrypt partition, but regularly find bits and pieces of stuff scattered here and there on C: unencrypted.
Win does not segregate data in a helpful fashion. If my security concerns were serious, I wouldn't dare anything less than whole disk encryption. Actually, I'd probably stop using Windows.
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).
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
How about the following...
"My presentation is on this drive and I forgot the password, get my files for me!"
users dont like it when you say, " sorry, but unless you remember your password all your files on that drive are gone forever."
That stopped it at my last IT gig, I mentioned that response to the CTO and he said...
"oooh, Did not think of that. let's skip encryption."
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That comic has been making the rounds. It's cute, but not applicable.
If the submitter is in an organization with thousands of machines, the notion that any user will be required to keep their password confidential in the face of torture is laughable. That's for specially trained operatives, soldiers, and other assorted heroes. Those of us in the normal world will probably adopt a more rationale perspective. If someone were crazy enough to steal one of our laptops, simultaneously snatch the user, and threaten them with torture, our folks know to give up all passwords, immediately. We're only required to keep data confidential where it is reasonable to do so. When floods sweep away your car, wave goodbye to your laptop in the trunk. When someone threatens you physically, tell 'em what they want to hear.
Our people are more important than our data. Our people are more important than the publics data. If we lose a chunk of data, we have ways to reconstruct what was lost and mitigate damage. If we lose an employee, there is no way to achieve a good outcome.
Reasonable?
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.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
An elaborate system of Post It Notes (All ROT13'd)
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!
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.
Oh. Well THAT sounds like a plus.
caritj.org
No. Let me explain to you how this works, with a story link.
Companies are storing more, and more, and more, and more, and more information. About their customers, about their suppliers, about themselves, about employees, about employees friends, about customers friends, about customers employees, etc , etc, etc. It's like a Panopticon Party, and everyone with a datacentre is invited. With hard disc space costs plummeting, processor power rising, and networked recorders becoming ubiquitous, companies and managers everywhere have succumbed to the data deluge, and have meticulously stored and categorized every last bit they can lay their hands on. (For what purpose is a question for another day).
The result. Exabytes of data sitting idle on servers, unencrypted, waiting to to stolen. Predictably it is, usually with nothing more than a USB key, or USB hard disc. The people who pay for such illicit data presumably want it all for something. If the data was even encrypted in the most basic fashion, most of the constant data breaches we here about would never have occurred.
Companies have two options. First, stop gathering and storing this data. That will never happen. Most compaines are data junkies by this point. Secondly; Encrypt, Everything. Everything. Any unencrypted portion of your network is a data breach waiting to happen. Even the slightest crack is a PR disaster waiting to happen. I don't care if its a telnet client on a headless offline BSD system, sitting in a securely locked room in the basement. Someone WILL find a way to lose data using it.
I applaud the submitters goal. It is a worthy one, and is likely the only real thing standing between your credit card number and a fraudsters ebay login page. More power to them.
May the Maths Be with you!
I see this directive a lot. It boils down to "We don't know where our sensitive data is, or don't trust our employees to keep it where it should be, so we're encrypting everything!".
Most of the time when I see this, it's because the person making the directive is responsible for security in some manner but has no experience with risk management and mitigation, so they go for the "all out, definitely safe!" shotgun solution. The problem is there's no such thing!
What risks are you actually attempting to mitigate through encrypting everything, and are you aware of the risks you are creating? These are questions the person who made the directive should be able to answer! For instance, if you are trying to mitigate the "PII/Lost Laptop" risk, why not implement drive encryption on laptops only, and buy USB sticks (such as Ironkey) which guarantee the encryption? If you're trying to stop a malicious insider, no amount of encryption will save you if they've been given the key.
Finally as others suggested, what's your key management and password management strategy? I -love- truecrypt but I wouldn't suggest it for a whole enterprise without being able to answer the question "How do I recover the key to this workstation when the employee dies unexpectedly of a heart attack?".
Best of luck in your endeavor but remember this rule: When it comes to implementing security, NEVER BE AFRAID TO ASK MORE QUESTIONS - especially about requirements.
I can't tell, are you joking? With all the sarcasm around Slashdot it's sometimes difficult to tell if someone is being snarky.
The scenario you mention wouldn't happen unless a half-baked encryption scheme was used. HP, RSA, IBM, and even Truecrypt all have recovery options ranging in levels of difficulty to implement. RSA's key management tools are quite handy but you definitely pay a premium for them. HP's are clunky like all HP software, IBM has been doing it for years but again you pay and arm and a leg.
With Truecrypt you create two to three thumbdrives when you do the initial encryption, two of them store the master encryption key and the third has whatever key is needed for authentication depending on how you want to deploy it. The only fault I have with Truecrypt is that there are a dozen ways to deploy it so you have to read and plan very carefully before deploying it on any level.
Once you have your flash disk you copy its contents to an encrypted folder on your SAN somewhere and keep the flash drive in a properly fire-proof safe. One flash drive has the keys for over a hundred machines with room for plenty more, keeping two copies ensures that a flash drive dying won't leave your data inaccessible during transport to the server and should the SAN experience some sort of data loss you can go back to the flash drive to recover keys.
Encryption is pretty scary as your keys are extremely important as you mention, once the key is lost then so is the data. So you take a few precautions ahead of time and then you don't need to worry.
users dont like it when you say, " sorry, but unless you remember your password all your files on that drive are gone forever."
That stopped it at my last IT gig, I mentioned that response to the CTO and he said...
"oooh, Did not think of that. let's skip encryption."
There's exactly two WTFs here, you and the CTO. We have full disk encryption, but there's a support procedure to identify and get a password reset code. And if all else fails, IT has an extra master login to decode the disk. I don't know what truecrypt has but even a cursory look at the available products would have told you that. No sane business would ever work so that if an employee got run over by the bus, everything that person has been doing is gone forever.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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?
My company has been running all the machines that aren't at our data center encrypted, starting around August of 2007. On my laptop I honestly just have not noticed the overhead of encryption more than once or twice in that time. When I started it was on a 1.8GHz Pentium M box, so it's even less of a concern with my 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo.
As I said, it's worked out so well that it's now the standard setup on our laptops. The Eee's my wife and I got last week are running encrypted partitions as well.
Before I started, I was worried about the overhead of the encryption, but I was really worried for no reason. I've almost never noticed it, and none of the other folks in my organization complain about it either.
We are using the Linux encryption stuff running under LVM, so our swap is encrypted as well. Everything but /boot is encrypted. We are using "cryptsetup" (dm_crypt) (built into the Ubuntu Hardy and up "alt" installer and Fedora 10 and up). I'd recommend that for the Linux side.
I've heard good things about TruCrypt, but haven't used it. We don't use Windows or Mac, so the stuff that's built into Linux is our preference.
The dm_crypt stuff includes "LUKS", which allows you to have multiple keys for accessing the data. So you'd probably want to set up a "user key" and "company key" for each system, and if the user forgets their key someone can check out the company key and set a new user key.
So, in that way you don't need to worry about the user forgetting their password.
Also, you still need to have good backups of the file-systems, so if someone does forget their data you can at worst case recover from the most recent backup.
So the worry of losing keys is a no-op. If you don't have good backups, check out backuppc. I've been very impressed with it.
Finally, as far as the other poster saying that it's a "shotgun" approach for people who are too lazy to identify their important data... Do you also try to back up only your most important data? What if someone adds a new important data?
I started with only encrypting a part of the system (because full system encryption was difficult to achieve in older Linux releases). The problem is with leakage. As with backups, it's more provably correct to cover more data rather than less.
This is why for backups I only do exclusions instead of listing the data I want to back up. That way if more data gets added, I have to explicitly exclude it for it not to be backed up.
The same thing applies to crypto. Ok, so you encrypt your sensitive data. Do you have updatedb running? Or beagle? If someone looks at the "locate" database of all the files on your system, will that expose something you didn't want exposed? Like the list of your clients? It would for ours, because our document repository has useful file-names. Similar for the beagle database.
What are you leaking that you didn't intend to be?
Just encrypt the whole damn thing.
Sean