Disk Encryption For Your Laptop
Channel: Jay Paul
Date: 2013-05-01

Disk Encryption For Your Laptop  -  LinuxFest 2013

Presentation by Seth Schoen, a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on April 28, 2013.

Disk encryption is an important precaution to protect data on your device if it's ever lost or stolen—something that unfortunately happens more often than laptop users expect.  The goal of disk encryption is to make sure that the contents of your device can only be read by authorized users.

In this presentation, I'll address topics like what are the most popular disk encryption options and tools for Linux systems?  How do you enable them? What's the difference between full-disk encryption and per-user encryption? What's the difference between disk encryption and GPG? How should you create an encryption passphrase? How can you reduce the risk of losing or forgetting your passphrase?

How has the law recently treated the use of disk encryption?
What are the limitations of disk encryption? How could it be bypassed or broken?
How can we use disk encryption to prevent on-line or cloud backups?

I hope to show that disk encryption is a valuable precaution, now pretty well-integrated on modern Linux systems, and one that may not unduly complicate your computing experience.