[Novalug] Pointsec Hard Drive Encryption for Linux

[Matt Ahrens]

Sure, the main difference is the entire harddrive is encrypted with
PointSec, with TrueCrypt it's more of a volume or portion of a drive
which is encrypted.  TrueCrypt requires the use of an unencrypted OS
and subsequently mounts an encrypted drive/volume.  Where as PointSec
has code that facilitates communications between an encrypted
harddrive and the OS.  With TrueCrypt, at best the main portions of
the OS (kernel, critical binaries, etc) are left unencrypted, where as
with PointSec the entire drive is always encrypted.

I do not believe TrueCrypt can currently replace the functionality of
something like a PointSec, hence the not a solution statement.

You can check out the Wikipedia article on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Disk_Encryption

Hit me off list if my description is weak.

ecryptfs is another Linux based solution which is interesting, you can
mount a directory as an encrypted directory.  When mounted the files
appear to be normal, when unmounted the file names still appear, but
the contents in the files are encrypted.

http://ecryptfs.sourceforge.net/

Thanks,
Matt

On 10/9/07, Theodore Ruegsegger <truegsegger at csc.com> wrote:
> Matt wrote:
>
> > TrueCrypt... is not a solution for whole disk encryption.
>
> Care to elaborate why not? It seems clear from the docs that you can
> encrypt whole disks with TrueCrypt. What makes it "not a solution"?
>
> Ted
>
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