Full Disk Encryption Products?

[Guest 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

[Guest 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".

[Guest 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

[Guest 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!

[Guest 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