Network crypto is not enough: One example of why.

[David Honig]

At 12:45 PM 3/2/01 -0800, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>A few days ago, someone mugged one of our tech writers outside her 
>apartment building. 
>
>She had a laptop computer that was company property, and which 
>contained among other things, an application the company licenses 
>to registered users at a quarter-million dollars a pop, in a 
>release-candidate version that we're not going to be sending out 
>to customers until it's been in testing and doc for another couple 
>of weeks.  
>...

Mr. Bear, sorry to hear your company is so fsck'ed.  Excellent
post, BTW; exemplar.  But you don't need bios-level encryption; Scramdisk
or PGPdisk
are free, reliable, and would completely solve your multizillion dollar
worries.  Simply use all the space on the laptop as an encrypted drive,
and put all the tools and work directories there, so there's no way
to get around it.  Make it (future) corporate policy ---previously I bet you
wouldn't have been able to convince them, but now you can.  The next 'mugger'
might be the one you fear.



.......
Unbeknown to the latter, Marks had already cracked General de Gaulle's
private cypher 
in a spare moment on the lavatory.