BLU Meeting: Whole Disk Encryption

This month's meeting is a series of "lightning talks" by several speakers.

First off was Jerry Feldman's presentation, which lasted about 15 minutes.
Jerry's talk was about general issues common to all whole-disk encryption
software.

Next up was Ned Harvey, from 7:15pm to 7:58pm, who compared a number of
disk encryption suites:

1. TrueCrypt
2. Microsoft'd BitLocker
3. Apple's OSX Encrypted DMG, SparseImage and SparseBundle
   
4. Apple's FileVault 1 and FileVault 2
5. EncFS, Boxceyptor, Encfs4win, CryptKeeper
   

Some of Ned's discussion:

• how hardware AES crypto chips improve performance
• biometrics and TPM
• need to save TPM's 40-char key -- needed e.g. when motherboard gets replaced, to activate new TPM hardware on the new motherboard
• impact on backup/restore
• using crypto with DropBox to share with coworkers

next up was Bill Ricker, from 8:01pm to 8:29pm, discussing a new paper on a weakness in RSA public key generation

"Ron was wrong, Whis is right" (Arjen K. Lenstra and James P. Hughes)

New research: There's no need to panic over factorable keys--just mind your Ps and Qs