Re: Laptop Security - harddisk encryption necessary?

In article <ett61i$2f8$02$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Ertugrul Soeylemez wrote:

By the way, you don't need to encrypt your entire HD. This is overkill
in most cases. Create an encrypted container for your personal
directory, whereever it is.


You also need to encrypt your swap file or partition, to prevent
the reading of sensitive information held in memory that might
have been paged out. If the attacker is particularly lucky, he
might even get the decryption key he needs to read the encrypted
parts of your disk. You should also encrypt your temp directories
for the same reason, although that's less critical (an attacker
won't get your decryption keys there unless the encryption program
is incompetently written, for example). And in Windows especially,
it's difficult to be sure where sensitive information may wind up
stored or cached; some programs keep stuff outside of your personal
directory (which is why so many programs need you to be
Administrator).

--
Christopher Mattern

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