Password protecting portable HDD

Discussion in 'Software' started by soroush, Oct 27, 2007.

  1. soroush

    soroush New Member

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    Hi, iv been given a portable hard disk drive by work and it contains very sensative data, is there anyway that i can password protect it perhaps hash encryption so no one can access it if i misplace it or it gets stolen?
     
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  2. simongrahamuk
    Honorary Member

    simongrahamuk Hmmmmmmm?

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    You could simply use EFS to encrypt it?
     
  3. Phoenix
    Honorary Member

    Phoenix 53656e696f7220 4d6f64

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    or TrueCrypt
     
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  4. soroush

    soroush New Member

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    how strong is EFS encryption? Only works on windows XP machines? Is it reversable if pluged into a unix machine?
     
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  5. Bluerinse
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    Bluerinse Exabyte Poster

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    EFS is strong, i believe from memory it's 128 bit. However, you would need a PC running Windows XP or Vista to de-crypt it as it needs a private key and the related EFS software. as far as i am aware the volume needs to support EFS ie it needs to be running Microsoft's latest version of NTFS. I'm not certain it would work on a removable USB stick at all.
     
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  6. soroush

    soroush New Member

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    any other ways then?
     
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  7. simongrahamuk
    Honorary Member

    simongrahamuk Hmmmmmmm?

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    The problem that you will have with encryption if the data is going to be moved around systems is how you unencrypt it. Since encryption requires a the use of keys to encrypt the data and decrypt it how do you share the key amongst different platforms?

    Perhaps simply password protecting each file would be a way forward?
     
  8. soroush

    soroush New Member

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    i understand what your saying simon, makes sense.. could i just password protect the whole drive?
     
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  9. simongrahamuk
    Honorary Member

    simongrahamuk Hmmmmmmm?

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    I don't think that is possible, I may be wrong though.

    It looks like it could well be the long winded way fo doing it for each and every file. I don't even think that you can password protect at the folder level. :(
     
  10. Sparky
    Highly Decorated Member Award 500 Likes Award

    Sparky Zettabyte Poster Moderator

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  11. soroush

    soroush New Member

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    iv been looking at truecrypt and it seems good but iv got a couple of questions, what kind of encryption does it have? Would i have to encrypt my HDD everytime i add new data to it? What OS does it support? Im very new to encryption, thanks lads.
     
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  12. dales

    dales Terabyte Poster

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    truecrypt does seem the way to go, but then again I wouldnt worry about it if I were you its obviously not sensitive to the company,otherwise they would have already provided you with some form of encryption, and if its really sensitive then they wouldnt let it off there network!

    unless of course you are the IT bod looking around for encryption so you can give it to a user, in that case then the above doesnt apply. As the others say EFS is an NTFS system only, and you have to export and carry around the cert's with you and install them on the target machine before you can read the data again. Truecrypt has installers for windows and linux, best bet is to download it and try it out, see what happens!
     
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  13. grim

    grim Gigabyte Poster

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    blowfish encryption :)

    grim
     
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