harddrive encryption

[Roland Smith]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 08:10:40AM -0800, Chip Camden wrote:
> It seems prudent to me to reduce the attack surface to that which really
> needs to be defended -- "When you defend everything, you defend nothing".
> Not to mention avoiding the overhead of encrypting OS files.

Indeed.
 
> What do you folks think of the relative merits of AES vs Blowfish for
> disk encryption?

Neither have been broken with their complete number of rounds. Versions of
both can be broken with a reduced number of rounds. See
http://www.schneier.com/paper-blowfish-oneyear.html for some analysis of
blowfish, and e.g. http://www.schneier.com/paper-rijndael.html for several
attacks on Rijndael with reduced rounds.

It looks like both are viable choices today. Certainly good enough to protect
your data in case of hardware theft. No encryption method is secure against
lead-pipe cryptanalysis. [http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-10-19] :-)

But it seems like a safe bet that there will be more effort spent on breaking
AES/Rijndael.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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