Coding is Hard

Encryption

Posted 12 months ago.

The last post on backups leads in to this post. Currently my encryption practices are all over the place. I use full hard drive encryption on one of my boxes. On another, I encrypt the entire home directory. On a third, I only encrypt confidential files.

Of course, encryption provides little protection against data intrusion on a running system, but it does provide some peace of mind in case your laptop or hard drive is stolen.

On some systems, full disk encryption is more trouble than it’s worth — Windows, for example, which only has this option available for some configurations. There, it’s generally better to encrypt individual directories. On newer distributions in the Linux world, the situation is somewhat better. Especially now that encrypted drives are automatically recognized by most recovery tools, come time to fix something.

Am I going to change how I do things? It may be a good idea to take a hard look at my practices on my semi-encrypted systems, and encrypt more directories. Other than that, I’m not too worried right now.