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Calculating the Cost of Full Disk Encryption
CowboyRobot writes "Is full disk encryption (FDE) worth it? A recent study conducted by the Ponemon Institute shows that the expected benefits of FDE exceed cost by a factor ranging from 4 to 20, based on a reduction in the probability that data will be compromised as the result of the loss or theft of a digital device. 'After doing all of the math, Ponemon found that the cost of FDE on laptop and desktop computers in the U.S. per year was $235, while the cost savings from reduced data breach exposure was $4,650.'"
I am expensive, but not that expensive. I don't charge a customer $235 to click a full disk encryption check box while installing Fedora Linux. Maybe I should...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Does it cost Truecrypt TCO $403 year? for a company with fewer of 50 employees? I know Trucrypt don't have, enterprise functionality, like admin and user password, integration with identity management, but I thik 403$ year only in support and maintenance, using this opensource and free solution. And It is very difficult to meause the value of the information of a laptop.
Damia
A recent study conducted by the Pokemon Institute... :-P
One issue with IT security is that policies and security measures like this are only one small part of the picture. My partner works in a government affiliated company and has to use FDE for all PCs. Because of how they have implemented it they virtually all still use the default key (which wasn't random) and if you change it then you thwart the original intent of having quasi-hotdesks.
Passwords written on desks, stuck to the screen etc are common in many places. Sending files off-network to places like dropbox or email to get around security 'hassles' is widespread. The owner of my current firm wants to use an iPad, because we won't let it on network he does most email from a web email account!
FDE with rubbish passwords is entirely pointless as anyone with motivation to get in can. If you start requiring complex passwords the risk of people writing it down and storing it with the PC increases. We need to stop thinking about security as a technical issue and work out how to produce 'secure enough' systems which users don't subvert or misuse.
If removing security breaches is worth nearly $5k a year then surely using some kind of RFID security card that must be near the PC/Laptop to unlock would be cost effective. I could keep it in my wallet or as a keyring. Even better would be combine it with a RSA style password device for two-factor authentication when providing a password (thus making less complex passwords less of an issue).
'After doing all of the math,
"After applying some simplistic formula"
Ponemon
"the guy promoting his firm with this /. article"
found that the cost of FDE
"without specifying any important parameters such as number of computers or environment in which they are used"
on laptop and desktop computers
"but noting that some were laptop and some were desktop because that makes the result sound a little more convincing"
in the U.S. per year
Encryption is a lot more expensive in Scotland. They can always look up yer kilt and ken yer keys!
was $235,
If this were a porn moneyshot, TFA author would now be panning away from the dick and squirting liquid soap everywhere, seemingly drenching the victim.
while the cost savings from reduced data breach exposure was $4,650.
Or $100,000, or life imprisonment, depending on your particular situation. Statistics: on average, not very useful.
At least partially:
"The study found that the most expensive element of FDE is not the hardware or software involved, but the value of user time it takes to start up, shut down and hibernate computing systems while using FDE. "
But this study doesn't pass the smell test. Take this, for instance: "The cost savings from reduced data breach exposure was $4,650." Imagine that FDE takes the risk of data breach on a stolen disk from 100% down to 0%. And imagine that any given computer has a 1% chance each year of being stolen by someone who's going to exploit the data on it (rather than just reformat it and sell or use it). Both of those are very generous estimates.
The average value of a lost computer to my company--either in terms of profits lost or competitor's profits gained--would have to be $465,000 for the math to work. Which as a median doesn't make sense.
If it's a mean, it only makes sense because there are a handful of computers whose value is tens or hundreds of millions of dollars counterbalancing the vast array of other computers worth far less--but if that's the case, the right solution probably isn't to lump all machines together for analysis purposes, it's to segregate out the high-value targets and treat their security differently from the low-value targets.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Not when you're using an SSD.
...$235, while the cost savings from reduced data breach exposure was $4,650.
I've got an old laptop lying around that's not doing anything.
Last thing I did with it was a clean install of a win8 beta.
You say if I encrypt it's harddisk, it saves me over four thousand US$?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It would be handy if people could share their experiences with encryption.
Good, bad, ugly.
E.g., is it better to encrypt your home directory (as Ubuntu gives you an option for), or the whole disk?
Has anyone had a problem where you were unable to access your encrypted home directory or drive?
Does encryption increase the possibility that a small problem on a single sector of a disk will render the whole volume unreadable?
What about using encryption along with various levels of RAID?
In some circumstances, I'll connect a harddrive via USB. If you disconnect it, sometimes Ubuntu won't let you access the encrypted volume again until you physically turn on and off the drive (or, sometimes, reboot). Stuff like that makes me fearful.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Agreed on the smell-test. No matter how good a security-measure is, it cannot save more money than is lost without it. (i.e. the best possible security is 100%)
Thus for FDE to save $4650/computer/year, the current cost of data-loss that would be avoided with FDE must be atleast the same amount.
There's about 100 million computers sold annually in USA, essentially none of which have FDE. The average computer is used for atleast 3 years. The total *current* cost of data-losses must thus be atleast: 100M * $4650 *3 = $1395 billion/year.
That doesn't pass the smell-test. It would mean the losses add up to $12500 a year for each household, which is utterly ridicolous.
In a corporate environment, you have to have some kind of key management system. You can't do FDE with a free utility that is just "Enter the password to get in to the computer." Well why not? Tow big reasons:
1) What if the person suddenly up and dies, and you need to get at the data? A backup won't help if said backup is also encrypted with the same password that only they knew. You need to have a system to get in.
2) More commonly, what do you do when a user forgets their password? This happens ALL the fucking time. People cannot remember passwords, just how it is. Just losing data is not an acceptable answer, so you have to have a system that can get in.
Now there are systems out there like that. They have central key stores, key recovery facilities and so on all while maintaining cryptographic security. However all the ones I've seen cost money. Then on top of that is the cost of administering such a system.
As an example at work a lady forgot her password, as she is known to do on days ending in "y". So she couldn't get in the encrypted laptop that has key codes for the doors (she deals with that). She also hadn't put the laptop on the 'net in like a year, so it was all desync'd with the Active Directory. This meant my boss couldn't log in to do any kind of override. So he had to hook it up, go through this key recovery thing where the console give you a bigass key to enter in to the system, then get it to sync passwords, then he could log in and get everything working. Took a fair bit of time to do.
You have to count all that kind of thing in cost calculations. You can't pretend like it isn't a cost. Yes you already pay his salary but he has about 5,000 other thing to be doing that weren't being done while he worked on that. Needless to say if this were being used for more than a couple systems (we only use it in special cases) it would quickly need one or more people who's job was to administer it and deal with all the problems caused by it (meaning by users).
Why do we need to encrypt an 18 year old game that has had the source code released? ;-p
on a modern cpu with AES hardware acceleration, the cpu cost is minimal. if you have valuable data, you'd be negligent not to enable it.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
So, how well do you stand up to beatings/torture, tough guy?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
And in your fantasy, does the Lady Cop say "Oh, Mr Neckbeard, your fingering is so... virile," then bow-chicka-wow?
There's nothing so sad as preparing for an apocalyptic showdown with The Man, when The Man could not possibly care less about you or your data. Encrypt, don't encrypt, you've got more chance of being eaten by badgers than subjected to a search-and-seizure.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
According to the article, they're the average actual losses, not potential. If the potential losses were $4650 and the actual annual cost of FDE was $235, then you'd need to believe that every computer has a 5% chance of being stolen and exploited every year in order for FDE to be worth it; the article would have to conclude that FDE isn't worth it for the average machine in that case.
By ginning up a ludicrously overstated actual loss, though, they're able to make FDE look like a total bargain--at least until you start thinking about it enough to realize the numbers are cooked.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
No one is bound to answer any question if the answer thereto would, in the opinion of the judge, have a tendency to expose (him) to any criminal charge, penalty or forfeiture which the judge regards as reasonably likely to be preferred.
- Established precedent over 1100 years of Common Law, from the Code of Alfred 870 to the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution.
In Saunders v UK (ECHR), according to which "the right not to incriminate oneself does not extend to the use in criminal proceedings of material which may be obtained from the accused through compulsory powers but which have an existence independent of the will of the suspect, such as, inter alia, documents acquired pursuant to a warrant, breath, blood and urine samples and bodily tissue for the purpose of DNA testing".
This would only extend to a passphrase which exists outside the mind of the defendant. It would be on the prosecutor to prove that such a document exists to obtain an order against which refusal would result in a finding of contempt. Therefore, no court can force disclosure of a passphrase which exists only in the grey matter of one individual.
- Also established precedent (NG08C10148, in camera and compartmentalised).
For those who are about to fire the thought-ending cliché, "What, do you have something to hide?" Why, yes I do. The nature of that material is nobody's business but mine, and if you think it's of an illegal nature, it's on you to prove it beyond supposition and paranoid delusion - "beyond reasonable doubt" as is required in a criminal process. But do NOT expect me to help you or feed your fantasy.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
If you live in a fucked up police state where this is considered possible, you have more problems to care for than merely encrypting data.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
As far as I'm concerned, storing any confidential data on a hard disk unencrypted effectively voids the warranty, because there's no way I'm going to send a drive containing sensitive data away for warranty replacement.
- tech time spent on password resets: zero. This is real encryption, there's no such thing available as "password reset", there's only a passphrase which cannot be recovered. If it can, then this means you have zero security
Nonsense. For example, Apple uses three keys: 1. The actual encryption key for the disk. It is never accessible to the user, it is stored in encrypted form on the disk, and by overwriting that portion of the disk, you can wipe a disk within milliseconds. 2. The master key. This key is used to decrypt the real key. It's a long hex number; you can write it down _and put the paper in your safe_. You'll never need it unless you need to do a password reset. 3. The user's password. The user has a password which is used to recover the master key. Multiple users can have different passwords. The password can be changed at any time without having to re-encrypt the data, because it is only used to decrypt the master password.
So you can do password resets, but only if you have the master key. Which is used _only_ for that purpose.