On Sun, May 14, 2006 at 08:20:07AM +0100, Richard Brooklyn wrote:
On Sat, 2006-05-13 at 19:54 +0100, Adam Bower wrote:
Does your laptop not have ide disk password support?, this can effectively lock an ide disk until you supply the correct password.
Yeah, it has this... but getting around that would be pretty easy I would think. It's like unlocking a mobile phone, it's trivial for the people who know how (and there are plenty of people who know how). Same with a BIOS password. With encryption, the data itself would be much safer.
No, it's far more secure than unlocking a mobile phone. To unlock a locked disk you need to /really/ know what you're doing and there aren't that many people who are capable of doing it. The support is built into the disk and the passwords are saved on the physical disk, and you can't bypass it as when the disk spins up it reads the password protected area and won't do anything else until you supply the password. Even swapping the platters into a new disk won't work as it'll start up see the disk is locked and ignore you until you supply a password.
I'm not using it as my only line of defence, this will stop 99.99% of your common theives and give you a much greater chance of getting the laptop back. If you rely on encryption at the OS level then your stolen laptop will have it's disk wiped and a pirate copy of Windows XP installed on it and be resold within days.
The whole point of this system is that it will cost the thief money to go and buy a new hard disk and then dismantle the machine to reset the bios (and it is very unlikely he will have this knowledge), more likely he will end up selling it to a mate for a fiver and it will get broken for parts or the whole lot will end up on ebay where I'll notice it and call the cops ;)
What it does is reduces the value of stolen laptops quite heavily, if everyone did this then it'd make stealing laptops "a bad idea (tm)" as it'd cost a good percentage of the laptops value to get it sorted which would make it much less unattractive to the criminals.
Thanks Adam