Ed Carp [khijol Sysadmin] originally said the following...
apiece - I'd sure hate to lose them to a malicious cracker, or someone who would like a personal copy of my source code for their own use, or who just wants to "borrow" my secret key for awhile.
"Is that a PGP key in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" :) The best way I can think of to protect your secret key is to store it off of your laptop. Put it on a floppy disk or a PCMCIA card and keep the sucker in your pocket or in a safe.
What do people recommend as the solution for this? Some sort of IDEA-based or triple-DES-based device driver would seem to be the answer to this, but I'm not sure which is the "best" (most reliable, fastest, easiest to set up) one to use. I like the sound of Michael Sattler's encryption driver for the Mac, but alas, I'm running MS-DOS :(
There's a program for DOS called SecureDrive (I think) that uses IDEA encryption to protect hard drives. Only problem you'll have is you'll have to repartition your hard drive. This is because the bootable partition needs to be unencrypted. What I'd setup is a small partition that's bootable and has a version of DOS installed on it. Then I would keep all the software/data you want to protect on the much larger encrypted partition. Another thing I'd note is that while it works great with uncompressed hard drives and floppies, I'm not certain that it would work or work safely with compressed drives. I haven't tried it yet. I'm at my school's computer lab so I can't dig up a copy of it yet (or remember where the FTP site I got it from) but if you want I'll try to track it down for you (if it hasn't been posted here already). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Greg Morgan <mac5tgm@hibbs.vcu.edu> | "I dunno Brain, me and Pipi Mail me for PGP Key: 0xE0D222A9 | Longstocking? I mean what would Key Fingerprint : 2430 BAA4 1EE4 AA2F | the children look like?" - Pinki 3B76 3516 3DEF 5529 | -----------------------------------------------------------------------------