Hot answers tagged encryption
15
You can do it with a .dmg.
Open Disk utility
Select New Image or File > New > Blank disk image
Choose the name, where to put it, the size (it will be pre-allocated)
Choose an encryption
Leave the other settings by default
Choose a password
Now, all you have to do when you want to access that folder, is open the .dmg file.
And it's free.
I found an app ...
10
John Siracusa's detailed Lion review covers the new FileVault disk encryption feature in great detail:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/13#lion-file-system
To summarise, the new system is "volume" based. This means that not all volumes can be or are encrypted. The Lion recovery partition for example is not encrypted. Non Mac ...
10
Open up the Terminal and enter the command:
diskutil cs list
You will see an output listing at least one Logical Volume Group, with a Logical Volume Family and Logical Volume nested below.
There is be a Conversion Status item in the Volume Family entry that will tell you if it's converting to an encrypted volume or not, and for a progress indicator, look ...
9
Your question contains the most important thing needed to secure a computer against a motivated attack to compromise a FileVault 2 protected Mac volume.
Don't connect FireWire to a device you don't or can't trust while you are logged in to an account that has file vault keys active.
Pick good single use passwords to reduce the chance of other compromises ...
8
Yes. FileVault2 is volume based so you can have an encrypted Mac OS volume and an unencrypted Windows bootcamp partition for instance. The Recovery partition is also not encrypted.
FileVault2 requires Lion to decrypt/decode the drive. It doesn't work with Windows Linux, or previous versions of Mac OS X. I recommend John Siracusa's Lion review for more ...
8
No, the backups will not be encrypted automatically, but it's very easy to enable for directly attached disks. Just check "Encrypt Backup Disk" in the Time Machine disk selection settings.
If you're backing up to another Mac, you can use Disk Utility on that Mac to erase non-boot drives and put an encrypted partition on them:
8
OS X 10.7.4 Core Storage for encryption, ZEVO for ZFS
Example
Objective: one physical disk, five volumes. One of five non-encrypted, one encrypted with a passphrase, three encrypted with a different passphrase.
Starting point:
/dev/disk2 – a physical disk
/dev/disk2s2 – a JHFS+ volume to be kept, unprotected
/dev/disk2s3 – a slice to be destroyed, to ...
8
No.
Apple securely transmits and stores the data to the cloud by using secure tokens for authentication - as officially stated in the iCloud security and privacy overview1 and the iCloud design guide2.
Apple also states they they will "never provide encryption keys to any third parties", which of course is not entirely true due to the Patriot Act3.
...
7
Time Machine does have a checkbox to encrypt the backup, but it will read, encrypt, and write every block of the disk - which can take a long time. If you are using a new drive it is much faster to encrypt it with Disk Utility first.
The encryption is handled by the OS – not Time Machine. Lion will prompt for the password whenever the disk is attached. Once ...
7
It's not possible (at least not that I know) to specify Filevault's target dir. It will work by automatically working with your home folder by creating (if you are in Leopard or above) a Sparse Bundle (or a Sparse Disk Image if you are in Tiger). The reason for the change has to do with Time Machine (and to allow -to a certain extent- to backup a FileVaulted ...
7
Yes, you can do this using the built-in Disk Images of Mac OS X. A disk image (or DMG file) is a file which, when opened, presents itself as a removable Mac OS X volume, similar to a removable hard drive. Many OS X applications are deployed on disk images. If you encrypt your home directory using FileVault, you're creating a spare bundle disk image.
You can ...
6
Mac OS X comes with FileVault for encrypting your home directory. There isn't a whole lot of customization for it, but it does its job. There are a few downsides, though:
FileVault does not play well with Time Machine backups. Time Machine can only back up the FileVault encrypted disk image when the user is logged out.
As FileVault runs it tends to slowly ...
6
Other than making sure you have power available when you turn on or off the entire disk's worth of IO to encrypt/decrypt, performance and power deltas are barely measurable.
Less than 1-2% is what I'm seeing. Other than hammering large IO benchmarks, in practice it doesn't matter one bit whether FileVault 2 is on or off for the initial build of Lion.
As ...
6
No, Windows does not support FileVault (so it would not boot if it was encrypted thus!) The Windows option would be BitLocker.
(perhaps it is more correct to say FileVault does not support anything but Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partitions)
If you need a great, free, cross-platform, open-source, strong encryption tool check out TrueCrypt.
Can you use ...
5
Check out Keka - the free Max OS X file archiver
With 7z and Zip you will have the
opportunity to create password
encrypted files to better protect your
privacy. It's as easy as write your
password in the box, and drag and drop
files to Keka in the dock.
Another way is to run the command in your Terminal.app:
$ zip -e myzip.zip ...
5
When I need partial encryption and especially when the encrypted container needs to be portable, I turn my head to TrueCrypt, which is free & open source software, available for the major operating systems, and can
create encrypted containers
create encrypted virtual disk images
encrypt entire disks
create hidden & encrypted volumes (by ...
5
No.
Time Machine backups are not encrypted by default. You have to opt-in. The configuration is easy if the backup drive is connected via USB/Firewire. If the backup drive is connected by Ethernet/Wi-Fi, the process of setting up Time Machine is more complicated.
Connected via USB/Firewire
Select the option in System Preferences → Time Machine ...
5
In general, no - setting an admin password is not enough to keep your files safe. If someone has possession of your MBP, it is pretty easy for them to change your account password, and then access any of your unencrypted files. Your keychain is safe, since it cannot be unlocked without the original password.
FileVault 2 (Full Disk Encryption) does not make ...
5
The /dev/random file on OS X is fairly good since it uses the Yarrow algorithm which many consider to be fairly secure in generating random numbers.
You can use dd to pull a character at a time off the stream and as long as you use caution in converting it into a number range you care to see in your text file, this is a fairly painless way to get some ...
4
I have a 2011 uMBP 15" i7 QC, 8GB RAM, with a OCZ Vertex 3 256GB SSD & Corsair F120. AFTER enabling FileVault 2, I did notice a throughput penalty (VERTEX 3) specifically, large file size write. Sequential reads showed 2-5% impact. Where write-throughput dropped >100MB/s. I owe the forum a more detailed comparison.
Regardless, having a secure volume ...
4
The article cited in your question is from before iOS 4 started using "Data Protection, which is Apple's term for creating an encryption key based on the users lock code or password. Basically the hardware encryption is used, but only accessable after a user has created an encryption key (which is based on the entered Passcode), and as soon as the phone is ...
4
You can not write to a disk image where the format is compressed
… files in and out …
The compressed formats do not allow addition, edition or removal.
You can use existing files to create an image with a compressed format. Write once.
If you create a new blank disk image that is compressed — with or without encryption — it will be relatively ...
4
According to a public talk by Rich Trouton, FileVault 2 is not FIPS 140-2 validated, but "Apple's new Common Crypto implementation is just starting to undergo FIPS evaluation"
The code itself for Common Crypto is available at http://www.opensource.apple.com/ and has been all the way back to 10.4 (where I got tired of checking revisions - it probably goes ...
4
The best way to do this is via Disk Utility in the Application/Utilities folder.
Review pictures for better understanding
Select the disk you want to encrypt
Choose the format method as in the picture, making sure you choose the option with Encryption
Next time you connect the disk, you will be asked to enter password.
4
It is possible to backup your FileVaulted home directory with Time Machine while logged in. The files will be stored unencrypted in the Time Machine volume, just like other files. I've written a blog post explaining the whole process here.
4
It encrypts the partition that you use for Time Machine, which likely means the entire disk. If you partition the drive the other partitions will not be encrypted and should mount (I have not tested this).
You can see that "Time Machine" is encrypted, but "Other Backups" is not.
4
You can use hdiutil to mount a disk image that is protected with a passphrase.
hdiutil attach -agentpass /path/to/image.dmg
That should attempt to mount the disk image, prompting you for the passphrase. If it's encrypted with a public key, you can pass that using option -pubkey.
4
To answer your first question about the keychain and whether you should encrypt backups: the passwords in your keychain are already encrypted, that's why you always have to type a password (by default your login password) to show stored passwords. So there's no immediate need to encrypt.
Of course, you could add Time Machine encryption to provide a further ...
3
It took me a little while to find the "Encrypt backup disk" checkbox, so I thought an answer explaining that may save you some time.
Press the "Select Disk…" button in the Time Machine System Preferences panel, and the "Encrypt backup disk" checkbox is enabled when you select a disk.
I decided not to encrypt my Drobo after reading Alrescha's important ...
3
Whole disks, no, but partitions, yes. While the Disk Utility GUI application cannot, the diskutil command-line utility can do this.
First, come up with a password (such as myVerySecurePassword). I believe this is not tied to your login password, unlike encrypting the boot volume.
Then, find out the identifier for the target volume, e.g. disk1s1:
diskutil ...
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