Feds encrypt 800,000 laptops; 1.2 million to go

Mon, 26 May 2008 07:39:54 GMT

A proactive move by the US Goverment. Private sector in the US has long mandated the use of FDE for laptops. The US goverment recieved up to 80% discount from FDE vendors for the initiave. My only hope that my local goverment and even local private sector follows this proactive informtion protection effort.

An excerpt from Infoworld:

U.S. government agencies are scrambling to plug one of their biggest security holes: sensitive information -- names, addresses and Social Security numbers, for example -- stored on laptops, handhelds, and thumb drives.

In the last year, agencies have purchased 800,000 licenses for encryption software through the federal Data at Rest (DAR) Encryption program, which is run jointly by the General Services Administration and the U.S. Department of Defense.

"Sales have been very brisk," says Fred Schobert, CTO for integrated technology services at the General Services Administration's Federal Acquisition Service. "We've been somewhat overwhelmed."

The government's fast adoption rate of encryption software comes after numerous headline-grabbing security breaches. Laptop encryption has also been on the rise among corporations, including the likes of EMC and IBM.

It's been two years since teens stole a laptop from the home of a U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs employee's home, putting at risk for identity theft a database of 26.5 million names and Social Security numbers for 26.5 million veterans and military personnel.

But this year alone, laptops with personally identifiable information have been stolen from Bolling Air Force Base, a Marine Corps base in Okinawa, Japan and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. In all of these cases, data that wasn't encrypted on these laptops could have been used by thieves for identity theft, according to a list of known security breaches compiled by the Privacy Rights Web site.

more here from InfoWorld

Full Disk Encrytion - unbreakble ?

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:12:14 GMT

Full Disk Encryption is the new buzzword for storage security. Companies are rushing to deploy it, legislators are pushing it in thier IT Governance Policy and both storage manufacturers and computer makers are rushing to cash in into this latest security requirement. So what is a Full Disk Encryption, what does it do, what doesn't it do?

Full disk encryption (or whole disk encryption) is a kind of disk encryption software or hardware which encrypts every bit of data that goes on a disk or disk volume. The term "full disk encryption" is often used to signify that everything on a disk, including the operating system, is encrypted. There are also programs capable of encrypting an entire disk fully, but not capable of directly encrypting the system partition or boot partition of the operating system (e.g. FreeOTFE, GBDE which can fully encrypt an entire secondary hard disk). To boot from a fully encrypted disk on a standard personal computer requires hardware assistance as there is otherwise no other way for the BIOS to decrypt and transfer program control to an encrypted master boot record (MBR). There are software programs that can encrypt bootable operating system partitions, but they must still leave the MBR, and thus part of the disk, unencrypted.

Benefits

Full disk encryption has several benefits compared to regular file or folder encryption, or encrypted vaults. The following are some benefits of full disk encryption:

Nearly everything including the swap space and the temporary files is encrypted. Encrypting these files is important, as they can reveal important confidential data. With a software implementation, the bootstrapping code cannot be encrypted however. (For example, Bitlocker leaves an unencrypted volume to boot from, while the volume containing the operating system is fully encrypted.)
With full disk encryption, the decision of which individual files to encrypt is not left up to users' discretion.
Support for pre-boot authentication.
Immediate data destruction, as simply destroying the cryptography keys renders the contained data useless. However, if security towards future attacks is a concern, purging or physical destruction is advised.

Microsoft Malaysia Security Advisor Page e·van·gel·ist: Hardware Security

Feds encrypt 800,000 laptops; 1.2 million to go

Full Disk Encrytion - unbreakble ?

Benefits