Hard Drive Security Tool Ships

PC Guardian has released version 7.0 of its Encryption Plus Hard Disk program, rebuilding it from the ground up in hopes of receiving an advanced certification of its security. The tool encrypts your entire hard drive (or selected partitions) rather than individual files or folders.

As with past versions, PC Guardian targets Encryption Plus Hard Disk primarily at businesses and large organizations with serious security needs, so it is designed to be set up and controlled by system administrators. According to PC Guardian, most installations are on mobile PCs, where security concerns are greatest. Pricing of licenses varies with volume, but the average is $60 per seat.

The company also markets end-user products, including the $99 Encryption Plus that protects folders as they are used, a much smaller-scale implementation of the Encryption Plus Hard Disk approach.

Protects Everything

Encryption Plus Hard Disk works by inserting itself between your hard drive and Windows. The first thing that loads when you boot your PC is a specialized operating system that asks for your password. Without that password, you can't boot Windows or access anything on the disk. But with it, the program will decrypt and load Windows. Then everything that is read from or written to the hard drive, from data to programs and even the swap file, is decrypted and encrypted on the fly.

Of course, all that decrypting and encrypting can hurt performance. According to PC Guardian, Encryption Plus Hard Disk slows most systems by 5 or 6 percent. If your experience matches those numbers, you probably won't notice the difference.

But what is the trade-off for a performance hit? According to PC Guardian, hard drive encryption is inherently more secure than file encryption. For instance, when you work on a file, Windows or the application may leave temporary copies scattered over your hard drive; encrypting just the file won't protect copies. It's also possible for a Trojan horse to monitor Windows and steal the password for decrypting your files, but it can't steal a password that you enter before loading Windows.

Improved Encryption

With Encryption Plus Hard Disk 7.0, PC Guardian is adding Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit key encryption based on the highly regarded Rijndael algorithm. The company hopes that this stronger encryption will help it win Evaluation Assurance Levels (EAL) 3 certification, although it has not yet been awarded. The EAL certifications are defined as part of the Common Criteria, a set of international standards for securing data.

Other new features include a redone, wizard-based user interface that makes the program more intuitive, and support for a single corporate administrator overseeing multiple local administrators. Version 7 also includes a question-based system to help users who have forgotten their passwords. If the administrator enables this feature, forgetful users will be able to answer questions they defined earlier to prove their identity and retrieve their password.

Most users will never have to worry about Encryption Plus Hard Disk; PC Guardian intends that it become nearly transparent to even those who have it on their PC.