Recommend a hard drive encryption software

[Nate_007]

Hi Guys,

Can you recommend me some good full hard drive encryption software to be deployed in all PCs in our office?

Ideally an ability to centrally manage it would be better as some of our previous users did not tell us their passwords and there's no way we could retrieve it.

Thanks.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Truecrypt is the standard open source and free software, you cannot centrally manage it however.

When you change the password of a truecrypt volume all it does is change the password to the Volume Header which contains the static key used for decryption the entire partition, this is what allows people to change the volume password easily without having to re-encrypt the entire volume with a new key.

Admins can create a volume initially with a known password, that will generate the volume header with their password and the encryption key inside, then you can use a backup volume header feature to take a copy of the volume header and safely store that somewhere.

Then when the password can be changed to one suitable for a user, they will only ever know the new password, if they then later change the password on the volume to something you don't know, you can simply restore the original volume header and use the original password to decrypt it. This allows admins to set up systems where computers have strong disk encryption which has a backup password that will always work and is super convenient to restore.

 

[seepy83]

I use Symantec Encryption Desktop (previously known as PGP Desktop) and Symantec Encryption Management Server (previously known as PGP Universal Server) to centrally manage policies, key requirements, force the disk to be accessible from an additional Administrator Key, etc. I've had a pretty positive experience with the product (but now that it's owned by Symantec, who knows what the future will be like).

 

[Nate_007]

Thanks for the replies guys. We gave some of our users PGP encyption from Symantec, works fine as it is but we just wanted to centrally manage it.

I know they have central management options, but we are looking for something that does not need be in a domain. Since our office is not in a domain environment.

Looking for something similar concept to Bitdefender Security Endpoint cloud-based management which we are currently testing. Basically we can push installations, updates, scans etc, to the computers in our network through cloud. The cloud portal is hosted in our servers in-house and it does not need any domain environment. Once Bitdefender is installed in the PC, you can manage that PC regardless of network they are in. Could be a laptop in a coffee shop etc.

So I wonder if there's something similar this for Full Disk Encryption. Hmm probably none though.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

That's way beyond the scope of typical Full Disk encryption package.

Your best bet will be to find a stand alone remote management software which works well with stand alone FDE on the same machine, what exactly are you trying to achieve remotely with FDE software anyway? It should really be something set up before the device is deployed to the user and then not touched.

 

[John Connor]

I've heard about this in the Truecrypt forums. http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/safeguard-encryption.aspx

I use TC myself.

 

[smakme7757]

I would have gone for Bitlocker in an office enviroment. If you have Active Directory and MBAM (No, not MalwareBytes) you can centrally manage the lot. Definately worth checking out.

Securstar DriveCrypt is another comapny offering good centrally managed encryption. But Bitlocker is natively built into Windows * Pro which makes it ideal.

MBAM Link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hh826072.aspx

 

[Nate_007]

After doing some research I came across AlertBoot. Never heard of them before but seems like it's web-based security service where you can manage remote machines through TCP/IP so it's ideal for environment without domain or AD.

http://www.alertboot.com/disk_encryption/full_disk_encryption.aspx
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/7/prweb10931804.htm

Any thoughts on this?

 

[Chiefcrowe]

I would probably go with bitlocker with Windows Enterprise and management tools if you can. We have a couple different ones in our place, PGP and Pointsec and they both seem ok but I think PGP is probably a bit more stable. However, they take a long time between releases and I'm not sure how the symantec sale will affect things in the long run...

 

[midwestfisherman]

Give this a look. http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/campaigns/dell-data-protection-solutions