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Posted by Popcorn Lover on May 12, 2005, 10:37 pm
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I have a Win Xp Home Edition box and would like to have logon
password protection that would REALLy work, in the event that it
was stolen, so no one could have access to my whole computing life.
I have Systemworks, is there anything in there that might do it? Or
in XP itself?
I don't want the ones that I've been hearing, can be bypassed by
anyone. Something really secure?
Does it exist in freeware maybe?
--
- Popcorn Lover
If you love popcorn too, there are no popcorn groups on usenet but
there IS one in Yahoo Groups:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Popcorn_Lovers
The internet's first-ever-in-the-world popcorn group!
Share the word on making great popcorn - come join us!
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Posted by on May 13, 2005, 3:53 am
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On Thu, 12 May 2005 22:37:57 -0500, Popcorn Lover
>I have a Win Xp Home Edition box and would like to have logon
>password protection that would REALLy work, in the event that it
>was stolen, so no one could have access to my whole computing life.
>I have Systemworks, is there anything in there that might do it? Or
>in XP itself?
>.... Something really secure?
You might want to look into ' Whole Disk Encryption', and at the
alt.security.pgp newsgroup.
HTH
Geo
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Posted by Tony Lawrence on May 13, 2005, 6:00 am
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> I have a Win Xp Home Edition box and would like to have logon
> password protection that would REALLy work, in the event that it
> was stolen, so no one could have access to my whole computing life.
> I have Systemworks, is there anything in there that might do it? Or
> in XP itself?
>
> I don't want the ones that I've been hearing, can be bypassed by
> anyone. Something really secure?
>
> Does it exist in freeware maybe?
>
>
I don't have any personal experience with this, but I noticed
http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net a while back..
--
Tony Lawrence
Unix/Linux/Mac OS X resources: http://aplawrence.com
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Posted by xpyttl on May 13, 2005, 10:12 pm
If you were Registered and logged in, you could reply and use other advanced thread options > I have a Win Xp Home Edition box and would like to have logon
> password protection that would REALLy work, in the event that it
> was stolen, so no one could have access to my whole computing life.
> I have Systemworks, is there anything in there that might do it? Or
> in XP itself?
>
> I don't want the ones that I've been hearing, can be bypassed by
> anyone. Something really secure?
There are two things to keep in mind. First of all, nothing is totally
secure. You need to choose your level of risk. Secondly, I presume you
still want to use the system, so the scheme needs to be at least tolerable.
First of all, I, and most of the other responders apparently, assume you are
interested in protecting the data, rather than the compute resource. No
matter what you do in terms of preventing someone from logging on, it's
pretty simple business to take out your disk and put it in another machine,
so to provide any level of protection for your data, you must encrypt it.
So the question is, how do YOU want to balance the hassle in set up and
operation against the risk of your data being comprimised?
There was a thread on this newsgroup just a few days ago where someone lost
the password to an NTFS disk. The data was, for all practical purposes,
inaccessible. Now most likely, NTFS encryption isn't the strongest thing in
the world, but it's pretty strong. I suspect many state police crime labs
could break it, but probably not the local yokels. Is that sufficient? Is
what you need to protect sufficiently illegal that the state police might
want to spend significant resources getting your data? If not, then
probably NTFS encryption, which is pretty simple to implement, will be good
enough.
If you want something a lot stronger, it is available. However, just from
your question, it is unlikely that you could install it in such a way that
it would be more secure than simple NTFS. The more sophistocated your
encryption, the more uh-oh's and oh-by-the-way's there are. While these
things, in theory, might be hard for the NSA to crack, in practice, they
need to be installed and maintained by an expert to get that level of
certainty.
In any case, you will need to get a secure password (long, letters and
numbers, mixed case, and no words in any common language, and nothing that
anyone could trace to you) and change it frequently. If you don't, you are
simply handing your data to anyone who is good at a dictionary attack.
Now, you need to have a password that is hard to remember and hard to type,
and for heaven's sake you can't write it down, and oh yeah, you should
change it every month or so. This is a lot of hassle, even more so when you
forget it.
If your data is that important that you are willing to put up with that
hassle, then go hire a security consultant to implement some serious
encryption. But of you're not running illegal drugs, or handing nuclear
secrets to the Iranians, then just put the NTFS encryption on and call it
good. But still, think hard about your password.
...
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