From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 19:04:22 +0800
To: Jerome Tan <jti@i-manila.com.ph>
Subject: Re: HD Encryption
Message-ID: <199607300821.BAA23220@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 04:03 PM 7/28/96 +0800, Jerome Tan <jti@i-manila.com.ph> wrote:
>Is there such thing as HD encryption?

If you mean keeping the partition on your hard disk encrypted,
with blocks decrypted when you want to read them and
encrypted when you write, similar to the way Stacker and
Doublespace decompress and compress files when reading and writing, sure.  
Obviously this sort of thing is operating-system dependent....  

Most DOS commercial products that do this are not very good - they'll
offer some sort of "fast proprietary encryption" which is either weaker
than DES or FAR weaker than DES - though some use DES and a few have
triple-DES as an option.  There are several freeware products
as well,  with names like secdev and secdrv, that have good crypto.
I don't know the Macintosh market.  Some of the DOS/Windows products
work under Windows 95 or NT, some don't.

For networked environments, like Unix, there are better research-based
systems like Matt Blaze's CFS Crypto File System, but since it's written
in the US and Matt's with a large US company with many lawyers,
he's not allowed to export it to you.  There are also some commercial products.

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> 
#			Dispel Authority!