The TCG Specifications: A Hard Drive Encryption Standard For Us All

Computerworld discusses the Trusted Computing Group's (TCG), disk encryption standards. The TCG includes all of the major hard disk manufacturers, resulting in a standard that can be broadly supported by software, and which will allow enterprise wide encryption and management to be done far more easily.

Thus far, my experiences with this style of disk encryption are limited to Lenovo laptops which appear to be missing one key element: a simple way to check if the drive is actually encryped from a Joe User perspective. The real key to making drive encryption work for users will be making it approachable and usable for everyday users in addition to enterprise administrators.

Have you worked with hardware level FDE? If so, how was your experience?

Mac Full Disk Encryption: CheckPoint delivers first

CheckPoint announced their MacOS full disk encryption product, making them the first vendor out gate with a MacOS FDE product that I've seen. Their product supports central management and lists enterprise scale growth capacity, meaning that it may fill the currently empty FDE niche for Mac using organizations.

List pricing for the FDE standalone product ranges from $120-$60 per install, depending on volume. The datasheet has not been updated to include MacOS, so actual street pricing may vary. With that said, the price appears competitive with existing competitive enterprise level products.

I expect the price of full disk encryption packages to fall as it becomes an enterprise commodity rather than a specialized tool for high security environments - the availability of single system solutions using BitLocker or TrueCrypt's FDE make small scale FDE free already.