Harddisk Encryption

Ivan Krstić krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu
Sun Nov 26 14:37:46 GMT 2006


Andreas Jellinghaus wrote:
> encrypting root by default would be a bad idea, as the encryption takes
> away a lot of performance and usability

This is common wisdom that's been out of date for some time now. While
encrypting the root drive might cause noticeable latency for slower
machines, it can be done with negligible performance impact on a
standard workstation.

You will want to read Niels Ferguson's paper for the Elephant diffuser
developed at Microsoft for BitLocker, the drive encryption system in
Vista, if you'd like to see some hard numbers on this. I don't have a
link handy; Google will know.

-- 
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D



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