[thelist] [OT] Stolen laptop + Rails tip

[Jose Hurtado]

Folks,

A couple products, people tend to forget about are those that create a
secure virtual disk in Windows, and those that actually encrypt email among
all certified parties.

They are all based on PGP, a very secure algorithm to ensure privacy and
encryption.

There is even a free old version for Mac and PCs here:

http://www.pgpi.org/products/pgpdisk/

The paid version is pretty good and worth the investment if you need a
simpler, much better interface, it is called PGP Desktop, available for sale
here:

http://www.pgp.com/products/desktop/index.html

I have used both the free and paid versions in the past, and they are simple
and very reliable.  But do backup your files, since any problem with the
file system integrity in the virtual drive is fatal.  It almost never
happens, but I've heard it can happen, so do backup and store your passwords
in a very safe place, because this encryption in almost unbreakable by
99.9%of the population... oh the
0.1%, those are the guys with supercomputers able to brute force attack the
thing for a few days or months depending on the encryption.

About PGP encrypted mail, I did try it, but so far have not find any one to
use it with... it has been largerly ingored by everyone, so we keep sending
clear text messages as secure as a postcard... funny, sad, but true.  Has
anyone tried PGP Mail?  Is there any good client in the Mac or PC?

Have a nice weekend everyone!

Jose L. Hurtado
Web Designer / IT Specialist
Toronto, Canada



Message: 11
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 17:52:33 -0800
From: Mark Groen <evolt at markgroen.com>
Subject: Re: [thelist] [OT] Stolen laptop + Rails tip
To: "thelist at lists.evolt.org" <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Message-ID: <1140141153.7041.18.camel at mark>
Content-Type: text/plain

On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 09:13 +1100, Ken Schaefer wrote:

> ..However I don't know an OS that natively provides encryption support
> based on certs in the TPM. Vista will have that support (AFAIK), otherwise
> you'll be using a 3rd party piece of software.

Fedora Core 4 supports encryption though it's HAL (Hardware Abstraction
Layer), the kernel has device mapper and dm-crypt enabled as modules
(dm-mod and dm-crypt respectively) so you can't mount a volume if it's
encrypted. Of course this is no help for the OP now, just thought I'd
throw it out there as an alternative partition on his hard drive for
next time.

Linux does also support the Microsoft Point-To-Point Encryption with
some additional PPTP client software:

http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/howto-fedora-core-4.phtml

Got me curious about the subject, and found this open source whole disc
encryption software for Linux and WinXP/2K, supports steganography for
deniability if you need it:

http://www.truecrypt.org/

Untested by moi, ymmv etc.

hth!

--
cheers,

       Mark



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