[dba-SQLServer] True Crypt whole disk encryption

Mark Breen marklbreen at gmail.com
Mon Oct 3 14:33:30 CDT 2011


Hi John

>The algorithms are not particularly compute intensive and in fact there are
apparently instructions on newer processors dedicated to encryption.

this was what I thought I read, that there was some dedicated hardware that
is a tunnel that is used all the time, so it makes no difference whether it
is encrypted or not, somehow, it sounded too good to be true.

thanks
Mark



On 3 October 2011 11:32, jwcolby <jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com> wrote:

> > I read in the docs that it does not / cannot slow the machine down even
> by less than 1%.  They actually said it as a 0% performance hit.
>
> The truth is that the impact depends directly on the horsepower of the
> processor.  On a low end Celeron it would be largish.  On a single core AMD
> or Intel it would be barely noticeable and on anything more powerful,
> including multi-cores it is negligible.
>
>
> > Do you know how / why that is ?
>
> The impact is "fixed" in that it has to run each sector read through
> decryption.  The algorithms are not particularly compute intensive and in
> fact there are apparently instructions on newer processors dedicated to
> encryption.
>
>
> John W. Colby
> Colby Consulting
>
> On 10/3/2011 5:37 AM, Mark Breen wrote:
>
>> Hi John,
>>
>> I used True Crypt last year for an External Disk and it seemed to work
>> well.
>>
>> I read in the docs that it does not / cannot slow the machine down even by
>> less than 1%.  They actually said it as a 0% performance hit.
>>
>> Do you know how / why that is ?
>> thanks
>> Mark
>>
>>
>> On 1 October 2011 21:13, jwcolby<jwcolby@**colbyconsulting.com<jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com>>
>>  wrote:
>>
>>  The last iteration with my laptop I used Windows Bit locker to perform a
>>> whole disk encryption. This time I am using Windows 7 Home Premium which
>>> does not include Bit locker.  I had just about decided to use True Crypt
>>> anyway because with Bil Locker I was unable to mount the old hard disk on
>>> another computer to pull the old contents off onto the new disk.
>>>
>>> So when I installed Windows 7 I broke the disk into three partitions, a 6
>>> gig for the swap file, 100 gig for the OS/programs and 400 gig for data.
>>>  I
>>> then started Truecrypt and told it to go to work encrypting the whole
>>> thing
>>> and went to bed.  In the morning... the computer had decided to sleep
>>> during
>>> the night (lazy thing!) and so it was only 25% finished.
>>>
>>> It took most of the day to finish encrypting the entire disk (all
>>> partitions) and so here I am.
>>>
>>> Having done that I decided to hang the truecrypt encrypted disk on
>>> another
>>> computer, put the old disk back in and push the disk contents out to the
>>> other disk.
>>>
>>> The other disk would not finish loading Windows with the truecrypt
>>> encrypted disk on it!  It would start to load Windows (2008 server) and
>>> then
>>> apparently it ran into the true crypt disk and couldn't handle it.  It
>>> just
>>> hung, never finished loading windows.
>>>
>>> In the end I told the bitlocker software to unencrypt the old disk, then
>>> hung that on another machine and put the truecrypt disk back in the
>>> laptop,
>>> and pulled everything into the new disk. Well not everything but you know
>>> what I mean.  At least I can do that with the unencrypted disk drive.
>>>
>>> Things never work the way I envision them working.
>>>
>>> Truecrypt is not significantly slowing down the new disk.  I do have to
>>> enter the password at the point where the bios tries to load windows,
>>> then
>>> off it goes.  Not good for auto reboot after software updates...
>>>
>>> --
>>> John W. Colby
>>> Colby Consulting
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