File Vault – Power down your Mac to close the Vault Door
by: George Starcher, Associate EditorA real nice video and paper was released today on bypassing hard drive encryption. Nice as in well done. Scary though. More important to the typical mac user is that it works against file vault. You can see the article over on News.com. The news.com article is good to check since it has a clean explanation, links to the PDF paper, an embedded copy of the YouTube video. More important to the typical mac user is that it has a link to a slide show on performing the process against file vault.The lesson here… If you rely on file vault to protect your data. Power down your Mac completely when left unattended or traveling while not in use. Sleep mode is not good enough.
I would consider using protected disk images to store your secret data, and possibly TrueCrypt for Mac OS X to hide that disk image, so even if someone is looking for it, he will only find random data (unless he knows your password). You could even put harmless data in a TrueCrypt volume, and create a hidden volume inside the TrueCrypt volume, to have something what is called “plausible deniability” (look it up in Wikipedia). I wouldn't trust anything but open source software (not even Apple) to protect me from prying eyes.
You still need to shut down your Mac for safety, of course, if you leave your Mac unattended.
Comment by Rene — February 22, 2008 @ 6:08 am