encryption & biometric hard drives?

[Tobes]

easy guys,


it seems a few big name d'n'b producers have been hacked recently, and i need a new drive for travelling with my laptop, so ive been looking at fingerprint scanning and encrypted portable hard drives, but before i go spending my cashola on one of these for my travelling days i thought i would pass it by you guys for any info or feed back.


http://www.lacie.com/imgstore/more/safe_fingerswipe_circle.jpg


theres two types of these drives, both scan your finger print, but only one is encrpted, the encrypted one is £70 more, is it worth it, im feeling it is, but am i just being paranoid, which would you go for?


>>>>> not encrypted (http://www.savastore.com/productinfo/product.aspx?catalog_name=Savastore&product_id=102 83843&pid=45&tid=174)


>>>>> encrypted (http://www.savastore.com/productinfo/product.aspx?catalog_name=Savastore&product_id=102 85836&pid=44&rstrat=0)


http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000A2AIHI.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

[Tobes]

i think im going to go for the encrypted one, any one got any ideas about these, do they lock you out after a certain amount of time?

[Lusmu]

Do you know in which manner these producers were hacked? Do they use Windows, Mac or Linux?

Don't know about these hard drives in particular, but I have Lenovo laptop which has a fingerprint id system. Works a treat, but it is just a "replacement" for your password. The hard drive is not encrypted, and there are still many ways to hack a system with fingerprint id. It's very important to have a good password and practice safe hex (http://www.claymania.com/safe-hex.html).

What's your setup? Do you keep your files on your laptop or are they exclusively on a separate HDD? You could use encryption software to create encrypted containers on your hard drive in which would show up as a partition and then store all of your important files in that partition. The container is visible only when you mount it.

In addition to the encryption possibilities inherent in the operating systems themselves, there are commercial and freeware programs for that. A good freeware proggie is TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) . Easy to use and setup. And very safe. Also from keyloggers. You can use it to encrypt your USB drives as well.

FreePGP (http://www.pgpi.org/download/) is also a viable option, if you're not afraid of tinkering a bit. There is documentation aplenty on the net.

There are also commercial programs that you could use to encrypt your entire hard drive, including the operating system. The only ones I know are commercial and very easy to use. You can also purchase a USB-token to go along with that, if you want to add a physical dimension to your security setup. Utimaco (http://www.utimaco.com/C12570CF0030C00A/Docname/INTERN_HomeEN) , Jetico (http://www.jetico.com/) and Secustar (http://www.securstar.com/) are the vendors that come to mind right away, there are several others as well.

All of these programs provide very good security. I believe most of these programs have separate versions for Windows and Linux, but I'm sure there are similar solutions for Mac as well.

Hope this helps.

[Axialmeasure]

do not believe anyone - the basic (paranoic) rule. people are real bitches from time to time (alright someone all the time). the best way of keepin your work safe is to buy more than one computer if you want to connect to world wide web and of course not let anyone turning your "safer" computer on.


in the matter of encryption i did not know anything about these hdds but i have experience with software encryption - and must say i feel just little better about keepin my work from others. on the other hand in my opinion nothing can really secure you from people without conscience.


some of today's people can hardly understand somethin like personal ownership when they see something they can steal - maybe rant in the end





Edited by: Axialmeasure