Re: Query on adding a USB hdd
On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 06:12:36PM -0400, Greg Folkert wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 17:01 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> > After all the stories about laptops full of sensitive data being
> > stolen, and tapes full of sensitive data being lost, you still have
> > to ask why someone wants to encrypt private data?
>
> It comes to mind; why all this data is on a "portable device" in the
> first place?
Recently, a major bank here in Canada lost a hard drive containing
clear-text customer personal info (everything an identity thief needs)
in transit from one major city to another. I don't know why:
1. they didn't treat it like cach and send it via Brinks
2. they didn't encrypt it and send it over the net.
If you're sending backup to off-site storage (vault) other than backing
up to a remote data-center, for some period of time the data will be on
some type of portable device whether hard drive or DLT.
It would be very nice if there was a universal cross-platform rw +
encrypt filesystem for archives. Something that you could be confident
that you could decrypt and access in 10 years using whatever OS was
current then.
I did something similar when I was running OS/2. I implemented SHA and
I forget which encrytion algorithm in REXX. When my OS/2 died and I
switched to Linux, it was a simple matter to translate the REXX into
python and extract my archive.
Right now, my archives are not encrypted and are tarballs. With the
media I also save a debian install set.
Doug.
Reply to: