Reading Steve Jones editorial today reminded me about protecting data on mobile devices. I have observed that many developers are moving to laptop computers. In my case, the reason is portability. I may be moving to work with another developer at their desk, in a conference room, or even offsite, or at home. Like many developers, I have things on my computer I don’t want to lose, or have stolen.
Some people I know use boot loading tools requiring a user Id and Password before the computer begins to even boot the host operating system. I find that to be valuable, especially if it has virus protection built in. It does leave a hole in securing the contents on my hard drive. All someone has to do is boot with a different operating system on a CD or something else. Now they have access to all the contents on my Cdrive, with a little effort.
I reviewed True Crypt a while back. It was an open system boot loading tool that encrypted the contents of your hard disk. Without the password, prompted at boot time through the boot loader, all of the encrypted contents on the hard disk could not be accessed, except through the True Crypt device driver.
After I started using TruCrypt the project was discontinued, because it is virtually impossible to thwart all attacks from a motivated hacker with a powerful enough Graphics Processor. Still, I find no perception of degradation in performance with encryption running. So, why not block the easiest bypass of a security protected drive, by also using encryption. If your laptop is lost or stolen, at least your trade secrets, and maybe even test data, are much harder to expose.
For that matter, it wouldn’t hurt to encrypt the disk in your desktop computer as well. You never know what will happen to it when you upgrade to a newer machine.
Cheers,
Ben