Re: How much does disk encryption add to boot time?

[Alan Amesbury <amesbury () OITSEC UMN EDU>]

David A Lundy wrote:

>      We don't have experience here, but the figures I heard from the
> SANS Conference on Disk Encryption last week was typically about a 3%
> impact overall.  While it could be more at boot time because that is
> disk bound, it didn't seem to be a problem to the organizations
> presenting their experiences.

In other words, it's *hours* if the system initially took that long to
boot.  :-)

Under FreeBSD using GEOM, the difference is unnoticeable.

FileVault under Mac OS X also has a negligible perception on performance.

Personal experience with PointSec back in '03 and early '04 was bad; the
system had a tendency to get slower over time, too.  However, I've heard
that current versions of that product work just fine, and one of the
units here reports slowdowns comparable to that 3% number.

The biggest impact will be on disk-intensive tasks, so you probably want
to avoid using disk encryption for tasks like video editing, unless you
really need that sort of protection.


--
Alan Amesbury
OIT Security and Assurance
University of Minnesota