Pgp Program For Mac11/12/2020
The MacBook Air has soldered-in RAM chips: horrible from an expansion standpoint, but great from a security standpoint.By encrypting my hard drive, I am able to keep all of my data safe from physical disk access and other such tampering.Since publishing that post I have installed and been using PGP WDE on my MacBook Air for about a week.
Setting up PGP WDE had quite a few steps but was a pretty smooth process overall. After installing the actual PGP Desktop application, I was led through creating and publishing a PGP key. When that was done, it was time to embark on the task of actually encrypting my hard drive. The encryption process can be lengthy, however PGP desktop runs in the background. You may also pause and resume the process at your convenience. As the snippet above explained, PGP WDE encrypts in the background, unlike Apples FileVault which locks you out for hours while it encrypts. The first question I get asked when people find out that my hard drive is encrypted is how the performance of my computer is affected with the constant encryptiondecryption process going on in the background. Im pleased to report that I have not experienced any negative, discernible performance issues. From the in-OS standpoint, you would never know that the hard drive was encrypted. Its when you turn on the computer that youre faced with a pre-boot authentication screen. That being said, its important to pick a lengthy password with lots of entropy. Pgp Program Full Advantage OfFor example, to take full advantage of AES 256-bit encryption you must supply a 64-character passphrase. Otherwise, the passphrase will be the weak link in your hard drives security, not the PGP keypair. Unfortunately, two-factor authentication, such as having the passphrase and a smart cardUSB token, is not supported in WDE for OS X. My only complaint with PGP WDE is that passphrase authentication is not activated when waking the computer from sleep. That means that my laptop is most vulnerable when waking from sleep. Granted, it is still protected by OS Xs own password system. That means that even if someone gains access to the system, they will not be able to use any applications that rely on login and password info stored in the OS X login keychain. A common attack to gain access to encrypted hard drives is the cold boot attack where an attacker exploits a hardware vulnerability in RAM to find encryption keys, and then use those keys to decrypt the hard drive. I contacted PGP about this possibility and they told me that it is stored on the MBR encrypted with AES-256. PGP WDEs pre-boot authentication will prevent someone from rebooting your machine and booting up a live, lightweight Linux distro (such as BackTrack, Auditor, PHLAK and Knoppix-STD) that wont disrupt the memory footprint too much and make data recovery from your memory a reality.
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