Full Disk Encryption Products?

[benb]

Hi,

I'm looking into full disk encryption products, and I was wondering if
anyone here had any experience with any, and could recommend a product.
We're running Windows XP domain wide, and don't plan to upgrade to Vista &
Bitlocker technology for a while yet.

The 2 products I have seen so far are:
PGP Full Disk Encryption - Downloaded and currently trialing.
CheckPoint PointSec PC - Currently talking to a reseller about obtaining a
trial.

Are they any other good products out there? Our basic requirements are: Full
disk encryption, pre-boot authentication, integrated windows authentication,
transparent to end users. It would be nice if this could be
distibuted/rolled out from a central server, even if this is just using
group policy software installation & an MSI file.

Any suggestions, much appreciated

Ben

 

[Juergen Nieveler]

"benb" <benb@nospam.postalias.com> wrote:

> Are they any other good products out there?

CE-Infosys Compusec
Utimaco Safeguard Easy

Juergen Nieveler
--
There's someone out there for everyone - even if you need a pickaxe, a
compass, and night goggles to find them. Steve Martin as Harris Telemacher
in "L.A. Story".

 

[benb]

"Juergen Nieveler" <juergen.nieveler.nospam@arcor.de> wrote in message
news:Xns996ACFD0E22A0juergennieveler@nieveler.org...
> "benb" <benb@nospam.postalias.com> wrote:
>
>> Are they any other good products out there?
>
> CE-Infosys Compusec
> Utimaco Safeguard Easy
>
> Juergen Nieveler

Juergen,

Thanks for the products.

I had seen the CE-Infosys CompuSec product, but it says its free, where as
all of the other products cost between $125 - $150. Is it adware, or
limited functionality, reading the datasheet is seems to have most of the
functionality that the other products have, it says it even had local &
central administration. Whats the catch?

Does anyone have any experience with any other the fore mentioned products?
I have installed and tested the PGP offering, which sems to work well, but
it looks like it also comes with PGP Netshare, PGP Zip, PGP Messaging,
things we don't neccessarily want to give to our users!

Cheers

Ben

 

[Juergen Nieveler]

"benb" <benb@nospam.postalias.com> wrote:

> I had seen the CE-Infosys CompuSec product, but it says its free,
> where as all of the other products cost between $125 - $150. Is it
> adware, or limited functionality, reading the datasheet is seems to
> have most of the functionality that the other products have, it says
> it even had local & central administration. Whats the catch?

AFAIK you have to pay for the central administration console, and if
you need support you have to pay for that as well.

Apart from that, it's free and more or less full-featured except for
one thing: I haven't found a way to create more than one local user
account.

In Safeguard Easy, you can create several local users, bind them to
Windows user accounts, and the pre-boot-authentication allows you to
select who logs into Windows.

> Does anyone have any experience with any other the fore mentioned
> products?

I'm using Compusec at home, and SGE at work (rolled out to 30+
workstations so far, no complaints from the users once they get used to
entering username&password at boot time).

One large plus for SGE: You can sync the SGE password with the Windows
password so that when you have to change your Windows password, it
changes in SGE as well.


Juergen Nieveler
--
But then again, what the heck do I know!

 

[benb]

"Juergen Nieveler" <juergen.nieveler.nospam@arcor.de> wrote in message
news:Xns996BD7D125E6Fjuergennieveler@nieveler.org...
>
> AFAIK you have to pay for the central administration console, and if
> you need support you have to pay for that as well.

Ah yes, GlobalAdmin, I didn't see that.

> Apart from that, it's free and more or less full-featured except for
> one thing: I haven't found a way to create more than one local user
> account.

I've downloaded a copy, and will install it tomorrow, if I find out if this
is possible I'll post back!

> In Safeguard Easy, you can create several local users, bind them to
> Windows user accounts, and the pre-boot-authentication allows you to
> select who logs into Windows.

That's a fairly high requirement, if there's a user password, and the
machine comes back to the office because of some system problem, we need to
be able to login with a generic admin password, rather than exposing the
users password.

> One large plus for SGE: You can sync the SGE password with the Windows
> password so that when you have to change your Windows password, it
> changes in SGE as well.

Again, a fairly high requirement, the more passwords a user hass to
remember, the more likely they are to write them down somewhere. Most of the
other products I've looked at (i.e. PGP WDE) seem to offer some form of
windows/domain password synchronisation, so I assumed CompuSec did as well,
especially after reading the following on the datasheet:

"FREE CompuSec® will encrypt and store the system logon password together
with the username and the domain name to automatically log the users into
their operating system. This function provides a greater level of
convenience for users who now only need to remember one set of username and
password."

One assumes that if you change your windows password the CompuSec password
would automatically be updated, although maybe the software is designed more
for home/workgroup use where passwords don't change often.

Ben