Full Disk Encryption with Multi-Factor Authentication

[ae35unit]

I've spent the last couple hours poking around the 'net, trying to get the lay of the land with regards to Macs, OS X and available full disk encryption offerings - in particular those that support multi-factor authentication.

I pulled some of the data on Wikipedia out into more Mac-oriented tables, but it would appear that a product's support for a given feature doesn't necessarily imply support for that feature on your Mac (nice that we're finally at a point where this came as a mild surprise).

From what I've gathered:

• Symantec's PGP Whole Disk Encryption appears to be the crowd favorite
• BestCrypt looks great until you find out they essentially have no meaningful feature set for Macs
• CheckPoint's Full Disk Encryption looks promising

On the 'crowd favorite' point, I'm not very impressed with the crowd's judgement ... most reviews seem to equate a quick gui install with no further noise as proof that PGP-WDE is a great product. Perhaps worse yet, they often move right on to discussion of how seamlessly it integrates with Time Machine and Time Capsule - I suspect some users with data that merits such careful protection wouldn't be pleased to have it spewed unencrypted onto a hard drive in a wireless base station.

Not to disparage PGP-WDE, it just seems like meaningful professional reviews would include at least the level of detail included in Wikipedia's matrix of features, layers and modes.

If anyone knows of a more technical review of any of the Mac full disk encryption products I'd greatly appreciate a link.

Back to my original question ... I'm interested in multi-factor authentication, which PGP-WDE supports ... for Windows. I see that Checkpoint also touts MFA and I haven't found any Mac exception for that support (yet).

If anyone has experience with the Checkpoint Full Disk Encryption product, what are your impressions and do you have any insights into its support for multi-factor authentication?

Thanks!

 

[occamsrazor]

OSX Lion should have FDE built-in, from what people are saying....

 

[maflynn]

My company uses PGP for the whole disk encryption for OSX and so far its been problem free. I would recommend them over anyone else given PGP's track record.