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On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 04:40:33AM -0700, Sam Halliday wrote:
>
>
> Tomas Zerolo wrote:
> >
> > Note that I'm not talking about stealing the hardware, but hijacking,
> > trojanizing, whatever. That's the real threat, in this
> > Javascript/Flash/Silverlight infested world.
> >
>
> I'm still talking about theft of machines (particularly laptops) as that is
> a major threat. One need only read the British newspapers to discover story
> after story of articles where "sensitive information was on a laptop which
> was stolen". As pointed out elsewhere, psql + encrypted drive is entirely
> unpractical as no OS is setup to ask for an encrypted drive password on boot
> (similarly for headless machines, user interaction is required). A practical
> solution that accomplishes the same goals as the encrypted drive is
> necessary.
Now you are mixing things.
* A laptop (by definition *not* a headless machine) which you carry around and has sensitive data on it: there is _no_
excusenot to encrypt the drive. There are lots of options (TrueCrypt, for Linux there's Luks, some laptop vendors
providetheir own). There are lots of variants to enter the passphrase, some more convenient (fingerprint, I'm a
littlewary of this one).
Same goes for removable media, e.g. thumb drives (they get lost too).
Note that this solution doesn't fly without user education: if your laptop is stolen and then "mysteriously"
re-appearsyou _have_ to assume that some has jigged it. Don't enter the passphrase! Nuke it and install from backup.
* "No OS is setup to ask for an encrypted drive on bootup" -- this is a red herring. It's not the OS's job to do that,
it'sthe mount process (remember: it has to work on insertion of a thumb drive too). TrueCrypt manages this fine, as
doesLuks. Doing that at boot time for built-in media (my laptop does that) is just convenience.
* Server on a headless machine -- agreed. That's what we were talking about.
But i fear we are getting seriously off-topic by now :-/
Regards
- -- tomás
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