Encryption of staff laptops/usb sticks etc

[Vroomparrot]

Has anybody had any experience with software for encrypting data - mainly for laptops/usb sticks etc?

I came across Truecrypt which is open source and from the looks of it seems to do all we want. It doesn't have the policy based stuff that some commercial software has, but that would be overkill for our needs. Does anyone use this?

Cheers

[DR]

Why not have it so you have to use a finger swipe to access the data?

[TheAnimus]

If you've been buying laptops with support for hardware encryption (most do) then how about using Bitlocker if your vista, or one of the TPA alternatives for XP, on XP i used to use the Toshiba one.

That way everything on the HDD is encypted.

[Vroomparrot]

At the moment I am concerned about staff who may have data, which is personal data that falls under the Data Protection Act, on laptops or portable storage devices. Where this is the case we have a legal requirement to make sure that appropriate technical measures are in place to prevent unauthorised access to this data. Unfortunately, the act itself doesn't say what those measures should be* and at the moment where I work there is no central policy on this - although they are supposedly working towards one. Also, I work in an academic environment and that means that most staff laptops etc are purchased by the staff themselves with their own funds - and that means large variety in the make of laptop (we even have some Macs ). So I want standardised system that is easy to implement and support, but should cover the "appropriate technical measures" bit if we ever get audited. Truecrypt looks like it might do the business - it can encrypt; an entire partition or storage device; a partition or drive where Windows is installed; or can act like a virtual encrypted disk within a file. It supports Windows, Linux, and Mac, but best of all it's free

*It probably has to be intentionally vague to keep up with changes in technology.

[Lucio]

How about investing in a load of these?

Not particularly expensive on a per user basis and make it part of your IT policy that all personal information must be kept stored on the stick, or within your IT system (e.g. on network drives).

4GB of storage should cover most typical things and the hardware protection is fairly flexible (remember to use the Corsair site to backup their password!)

[peterb]

Bitlocker would work, but is only available on the high end Vista systems, not on XP pro or below.

ITruecrypt would do the job you want, or a commercial equivalent would be becrypt.

For a cast iron hard drive encryption you could use Flagstone product, but that gives no protection for your USB drives.

Alternatively for protecting individual files you could use PGP. There is an open source alternative (compatable) called Gnupg (gpg - Gnu Privacy Guard) , but it is CLI only and the few graphical interfaces that have been written for it (on the windows platform) are pretty clunky. (Integrates very well with Linux however)

[Agent]

How about investing in a load of these?

Not particularly expensive on a per user basis and make it part of your IT policy that all personal information must be kept stored on the stick, or within your IT system (e.g. on network drives).

4GB of storage should cover most typical things and the hardware protection is fairly flexible (remember to use the Corsair site to backup their password!)

Anyone who could make use of the data will know how to break the "protection" on one of these - it takes about 30 seconds

[Lucio]

Anyone who could make use of the data will know how to break the "protection" on one of these - it takes about 30 seconds

Someone should have a look at the Hexus.TV article on them again then and add some editorial remarks!