Keep it secret.
Keep it safe.
Whether it’s an ancient magic to rule them all or any other personal data you’d like
to protect, data privacy is of the utmost importance.
Let’s talk about how to keep your information out of the hands of the metaphorical necromancer.
This is DIY in 5!
Hey everyone!
Welcome to DIY in 5.
I’m Trisha Hershberger and today, we’re talking about ways to keep your private info, well private!
Hackers and data breaches are more prevalent than ever and, while there are many options
out there to defend yourself from this type of attack, encryption - aka the process of
converting information into blocks of meaningless looking data then converting them back again
via decryption - can be one of the best defenses out there.
This way, even if someone with malintent does obtain access to your device,
they won’t be able to decipher what they’ve found.
Today, we’ll go over the various types of encryption available and how you can protect your most precious data.
There are two main types of encryption: software encryption and hardware encryption.
Software encryption, as the name suggests, uses a variety of software programs to encrypt data on a specific volume.
When a drive is encrypted, the user will create a passphrase that will
unlock a key giving access to the unencrypted data on that device.
No key, and you shall not pass.
You shall not pass!
Software encryption acts as the middleman, encrypting data as it’s written to the drive
then decrypting it using the same key before it’s presented to the program on the device.
The benefits of software encryption are that it’s cost-effective and readily available in modern operating systems.
However, since the processor is doing all the encryption and decryption work, the entire
system will slow down a bit and, if a hacker is able to get hands on that user-passcode
or the encryption key itself since it’s stored in the computer memory, they will be able to access that data.
Hardware encryption, the type of encryption used by self-encrypting drives or SEDs, is a bit more comprehensive.
SEDs use an onboard encryption chip that will encrypt before data is written and decrypt before it reads directly from the drive.
This type of encryption sits between the OS installed on the drive and the system BIOS
and when the drive is first encrypted, the encryption key is generated and stored on the drive.
When the system is first booted, a custom BIOS is loaded that will ask for the user passphrase.
Once that passphrase is entered, the drive is decrypted and access to the OS and data is granted.
The benefits of this type of encryption are that the CPU is not involved at all,
so you won’t see a performance dip, and in most cases the encryption key is stored in the
SSD onboard memory which makes it a bit harder to find and thus, less vulnerable to low-level attacks.
For those of you who really want to delve deep and decipher the moon runes in all of this,
many encryption options currently use AES - or Advance Encryption Standard.
AES is a block cipher, so data is divided into 128-bit blocks before encrypting it with the 256-bit key.
AES 256-bit encryption is the international standard recognized by the US Government among others
and it’s the strongest encryption standard available making it basically undecipherable.
Think of it this way, the numbers after AES represent the number of key bits in each encryption and decryption block.
For each added bit, the number of possible keys doubles,
meaning 256-bit encryption is equal to two to the 256th power.
Then, each key bit has a different number of rounds - the process of turning plain text into cipher text.
For 256-bits, there are 14 rounds.
So the chance of a hacker coming up with the correct sequence is even less likely than
Tom Bombadil ever showing up in a LOTR flick.
To sum it all up now that we’ve been there and back again, while software-based encryption
does have its advantages, it can affect performance and often is not as comprehensive as a more
robust hardware-based encryption alternative.
Depending on your needs, you may be surprised by what is involved in securing your data.
Not all encryption is the same but understanding the differences will play a key part in how
effective and efficient your security is.
Thanks for watching everyone and I’ll see you next time with more DIY in 5!