With Lion Apple changed this concept from a user folder encryption to whole harddrive encryption, and they did an awesome job.
You can basically enable and disable the encryption at any time and the os will perform the encryption/decryption in the background allowing you to continue your work.
With enabled file encryption the user login will appear actually before the os boots ensuring only authenticated user's can access the harddisk files. You also get a backup key in case you need to access the harddisk from another os or you accidentally delete all user's. If you have a mobile.me account you can also backup your key online.
Once finished the system works fully transparent and you wont even notice that you are working on a encrypted drive besides the biggest problems with harddisk encryption: The Performance.
Apple did amazingly work here, without encryption Lion performs much better then Snowleopard and even with activated encryption you probably won't notice a big performance drop at all.
My personal benchmark results with xBench (warning: not scientific and no lab environment ;)
As you see the only real impact on performance with enabled encryption happens on writing data but its nowhere near the slowdowns you would experience with TrueCrypt or BitLocker. Reading data is amazingly a lot faster then with Snowleo even on an encrypted filesystem.
Conclusion
Apple did a good job revamping FileVault into a full blown harddisk encryption with great performance and easy handling.
70 comments:
Wow, so cool that you are already able to test that new OS! Thanks very much for sharing
Still here and taking notes.
I'll show this imediately to my friend. He's a real apple-freak too
Thats awesome. Seems very useful
Are all computers encrypted the same way? or am i just a techology-analphabet?
Personally, I use True Crypt for my encryption. I know it's for Windows/linux....I think it's available for Mac as well.
@Robert Fünf
Truecrypt has horrible performance compared with the built in encryption
and yes its available for os x as well
@elexerdelex
Each Mac has a own key that gets generated when you initiate the encryption
I thought macs were their own security?!
Good to hear it's a lot faster.
502 error & f5 generated double comment. Woops.
@Random Fan: they are, the disc encryption is part of the mac security concept
I'll have to try that...
learning something new every day
Wonder if there will be anything similar for windows platforms.
I have never had a Mac but it sounds cool. :)
sweet. now i need a mac!
Very nice software.
Nice to see that security is being more heavily addressed. thanks for sharing!
I like it. This could prove useful some day.
encryption does data good
It looks like lion is going to be a really good os. Do you know when it comes out?
That seems useful.
yeah, i use truecrypt but it does indeed have that performance drawback you mentioned. does this work for external drives and such too?
one nice thing about truecrypt is that it's pretty common and cross platform so you can always plug in a portable drive and access your encrypted info on other computers. If this can do the same, then that's pretty cool.
Great info here
Looks pretty good
Gotta hide that porn somehow.
Would come in very handy at airports. Believe it or not, recently the security people put a federal trojan on a business mans laptop while went through security.
Truecrypt.
thanks for info
sounds very safe
I like Truecrypt too, but I am always on the lookout for something better. But I guess this will pretty much be exclusive to the Mac OS, right?
thank you for sharing this nice tip
@Aaron M. Gipson
its no add on application its part of the operating system, so yes its pretty much exclusive
@Evan
late summer this year
It sounds good to me. Can't wait for it to come out. :)
can't wait to lion ;w;
This makes me want a Mac.
Gimme a Mac right now! following for future tips and maybe ill end up buying 1!
It sounds cool but I would never ever trust encryption software that isn't in some way opensource.
Good to know.
Very useful. Thx for the info.
@A
http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/libsecurity_filevault/libsecurity_filevault-36064/lib/
i am sure after the Lion release you will find the sources there as well.
This will be good for protecting files from hackers :D
Ahh again another great tip! Agree with above post! Thanks for sharing!
please keep showing, i'm lovin it. (not associated with Mc Donalds)
Cool. Very useful :)
This have to be great software.
Guess you can't be too safe, eh?
So they integrated truecrypt into the os, nice. What encryption algo do they use? Does it take advantage of AES acceleration in the new intel processors?
Nice, I'm glad it works well!
@Trelin
Encryption is AES-128, yes its hardware accelerated, check my benchmark to see how well it performs compared to native speed (benchmark is on a core duo tough)
Nice post! Keep in touch.
hotnewmusictoday.blogspot.com
like 'A' i'm usually distrustful of proprietary encryption but cheers for the additional link :)
That's interesting.
following and $upporting
therichesthappiest.blogspot.com
Awesome feature!
Lion security. Nothing like it.
apple does make very good stuff
privacy is always good
interesting read, not that im a fan of disk encription.
Really good read!
Thanks for sharing :)
thx for sharing!
Oooh looks great!
Nice, sounds even better than Truecrypt! haha
It makes PC faster? wow
interesting :)
I did a small piece about the new full disk encryption features of Lion on my blog, it looks like a great new addition!!
thanks for sharing!
followed!
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