http://www.alicebobandmallory.com/articles/2008/02/12/drive-encryption-matters en-us 40 metasyntactics <p>In a recent release <a href="http://www.truecrypt.org/">TrueCrypt</a> now supports <a href="http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=system-encryption">drive/partition</a> encryption.</p> <p>One reason to encrypt on disk instead of file level is that operating systems and applications sometimes accidently stores passwords on your hard drive. This can happen in a number of ways and one common mistake applications make is to not prevent to be put on disk by the OS. Modern systems have a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging">page/swap file</a>. If a program gets paged out while holding your clear text password in pageable memory your password will be written to disk. The problem is that there are <a href="http://www.schneier.com/essay-148.html">password recovery tools</a> that can scan your page file for passwords.</p> <p>You can configure Windows (and surely most other operating systems) to <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314834">clear the page file</a> on shutdown which will give you better protection (and slower shutdowns). Be aware that if you simply turn off the power the page file will be intact.</p> Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:26:00 +0100 urn:uuid:fc149744-6fac-475d-8a37-f548b4db2403 Jonas Elfström http://www.alicebobandmallory.com/articles/2008/02/12/drive-encryption-matters Security <p><a href="http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/encrypting_disk.html">http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/encrypting_disk.html</a></p> Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:51:24 +0200 urn:uuid:aa49deba-bfab-459d-846e-e76f088748e0 http://www.alicebobandmallory.com/articles/2008/02/12/drive-encryption-matters#comment-2569 <p><a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/21/cold-boot-disk-encryption-attack-is-shockingly-effective/">http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/21/cold-boot-disk-encryption-attack-is-shockingly-effective/</a></p> <ul> <li>cool.</li> </ul> Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:35:37 +0100 urn:uuid:45063623-b4db-4356-a53d-9969b1ed0305 http://www.alicebobandmallory.com/articles/2008/02/12/drive-encryption-matters#comment-2175