Security - what happens if someone swipes my hard drive?

R

RonaldMacDonald

Registered
Suppose someone broke into my home or office and stole either my interior or exterior drive and they then put it on another Mac or Linux machine? Is there anyway to prevent them from access to the data?
 
RonaldMacDonald said:
Suppose someone broke into my home or office and stole either my interior or exterior drive and they then put it on another Mac or Linux machine? Is there anyway to prevent them from access to the data?
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They could very easily get to all the contents whether it is password protected or not. Your best defense is to filevault your user account. But use filevault with EXTREME CAUTION because just say you forget your filevault password, the NSA might not even be able to help you. Also I've dealt with some nightmares with users using filevault with trying to recover data after a software corruption or failed hard drive and its turned into a nightmare.
 
Yes I am aware of FireVault and some of its problems. I think there may be some issues trying to use that along with Time Machine. My main concern is if they got to the passwords on the disk. Would they be able to get the passwords in keychain?
 
RonaldMacDonald said:
Yes I am aware of FireVault and some of its problems. I think there may be some issues trying to use that along with Time Machine. My main concern is if they got to the passwords on the disk. Would they be able to get the passwords in keychain?
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Yeah it is very easy to get the keychain passwords. I stumbled across it fairly easy, but I'm sure google will pull up several ways. Time machine will backup a filevaulted volume but you must be logged out for it to do it.
 
IMHO, trusting important data to FireVault is like letting hungry cannibals babysit your children........
 
Well, based on what was said in this thread and a phone call I just made to Apple, I do not want to use FileVault. Does anyone know of a third party software that can protect a directory or file on the Mac even if the HD is taken out of the machine an put in another machine by a thief or hacker?
 
If you have some sensitive files you can keep them in an encrypted disk image, which you can create using Disk Utility.
 
I believe that if you have your password for the encrypted image/drive in Keychain, it sort of defeats the purpose of protecting it. Not sure if you can encrypt your Keychain, though.
 
What you could do is set up open firmware password, and get the government approved screws to protect your hardware. So if anyone would get physical access to it, they first have to deal with open firmware password (that you set up securely), OR if they would get the idea of removing your hard drive, if the screws are those that they use in military you can be pretty sure those screws don't get removed.
 
my idea..which i dont know how to do is...

store my keychain file plus other important docs on a usb key, so that the keychain reads and writes all certificates and passwords to the usb device, then when i take the laptop out of the house (say) i can leave the usb device at home. if i get my laptop nicked then all security data is at home..

would this work and how do i do it.
\
andy
 
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