[Discuss] TrueCrypt with SSD

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> writes:

> As a data point: I don't bother with whole disk encryption.  I don't
> need it.  I don't leave my gear where it can be stolen.

You never know when your gear will be stolen.  Phil Zimmerman told me a
story once of how his laptop was stolen right off his lap while he was
working on a train in Europe.  They were at a stop and someone walked
right by him, snatched the laptop out from under his fingers, and ran
off the train!

> The average computer user with sensitive data on a laptop doesn't own
> that laptop, and thus is careless with it.  Without fear of reprisal
> or personal loss there is no incentive to act responsibly.  WDD is,
> ultimately, a technical solution to a social problem, which is why it
> doesn't work.

I don't think it's a social problem, unless you consider laptop theft
itself to be a social problem.  The technical problem is the question of
data theft associated with hardware theft.  Disk Encryption is one
technical solution to that technical problem.

Personally I've never encrypted my laptops before, but I started
encrypting my current one.  There is definitely a performance hit when
doing large data movements (it took me much longer to copy my homedir
from my old disk to the new encrypted disk) but I don't notice a
significant performance degredation in my everyday usage.

> --Rich P.

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available