Encryption Blog

The Latest Urban Legend: Cracking PGP Whole Disk Encryption (again…and again…)

Kelvin_Kwan | 20 Dec 2012 | 4 comments

Folks, the holidays are almost once again upon us. I sit here today trying to clear off my deliverables before I go on vacation. But you know what? The year simply would not be complete without having to respond to yet another claim of a 3rd party tool being able to decrypt/access a system encrypted by PGP Whole Disk Encryption.

So Here We Go Again…
This morning, I was made aware of a claim made by ElcomSoft that their product could decrypt PGP containers (as well as other Full Disk Encryption competitors). After reading through their blog and discussing my thoughts with the Symantec Encryption Engineering team, we have come to the conclusion that this claim is false! There’s truly nothing to see here.

The Weakness is NOT the Crypto Containers
I would agree that the...

Do NOT encrypt if you're running the latest Macs powered by Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUs

Kelvin_Kwan | 05 Nov 2012 | 30 comments

If you recently purchased a MacBook Air (Model 5,2) or a MacBook Pro (Model 10,1), do NOT encrypt your laptop with the current release of PGP Whole Disk Encryption for Macs (10.2.1 Build 4461).

These are the latest Macs just released by Apple based on the Ivy Bridge Processors from Intel.

Based on our QA testing thus far, we are observing these Macs not booting properly after authenticating the PGP WDE Bootguard screen. Our engineers are aware of the problem and are busily working on a solution to this.

Please check back to this blog for the latest updates.

UPDATE:
7/17/2012 @ 1:57 PM PST - Hot off the presses from engineering. A hotfix to address this issue should be available by the end of July or beginning of August. I will update this posting with any follow-up information that I have. Thanks for your patience...

Attention Mac OS X Users: Using PGP WDE or SEE FDE and the Imminent Release of OS X 10.8 - Mountain Lion

Kelvin_Kwan | 05 Nov 2012 | 71 comments

The newest version of OS X, 10.8 - Mountain Lion is scheduled to be released sometime in July of 2012 by Apple.

Based on past experiences, we do NOT recommend users currently encrypted with PGP Whole Disk Encryption or SEE Full Disk Encryption for Macs upgrade to OS X 10.8 when made available by Apple.

Symantec is actively testing PGP WDE and SEE FDE against the 10.8 developer builds from Apple. We will continue testing against all developer builds from Apple and also against the official release from Apple.

As a reminder, you should not upgrade to 10.8 if you wish to continue to use WDE. If you must upgraded to 10.8, then please decrypt your disk prior to installing 10.8. Once on 10.8, please do not re-encrypt at this point in time.

Please check back to this blog for updates as they become available...

Do Not Encrypt the Latest Generation of MacBook Air Notebooks and Mac Mini Desktops

Kelvin_Kwan | 05 Nov 2012 | 0 comments

Apple released a new generation of MacBook Air notebooks and Mac mini desktops in mid-2011. These latest releases of MacBook Air notebooks and Mac mini desktops have a known issue with Symantec PGP Whole Disk Encryption. Symantec Engineering has isolated this issue down to specifically the latest version of Mac Book Air notebooks 4.2 with the Intel Core i5 and i7 processors and the mid 2011 versions of the Mac mini desktops 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 with the Intel Core i5 and i7 processors.

We have successfully tested and verified that PGP Whole Disk Encryption 10.2MP1 works with all MacBook Air notebooks and Mac mini desktops and the Lion OS X operating system prior to the latest releases of these MacBook Air notebooks and Mac mini desktops.

An easy way to distinguish the latest generation of Mac Book Air notebooks and Mac mini desktops are to look for the presence of a Thunderbolt...

Hardware Based Full Disk Encryption Is Almost Here…Now what?

Kelvin_Kwan | 05 Nov 2012 | 4 comments

As many of you know, the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) was an initiative started by some well-known technology companies to help standardize and implement Trusted Computing. One of the first “products” to come from this was the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). There are various vendors that take advantage of the TPM chip for security related functions. (Full disclosure: Symantec is a member of the Trusted Computing Group.)

The next significant “product” to come from TCG is the Opal standards for Self Encrypting Drives (SED). The Opal standard is an industry standard for any hard disk drive (HDD) manufacture to sell SEDs that would comply with these standards. Now what this means, is that these HDDs will have encryption already built into the hardware.

“Great! We won’t need to evaluate any of the software encryption vendors out there. We can simply just buy SEDs from the...

PGP Whole Disk Encryption Now EAL 4+

Tim_Matthews | 05 Nov 2012 | 0 comments

We are pleased to announce that PGP® Whole Disk Encryption successfully achieved Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+) certification.

Level 4 is the highest possible level that is mutually recognized by all countries participating in the Common Criteria certification (the plus denotes augmentation of ALC_FLR.1 Flaw Remediation).

PGP Corporation is one of the only vendors to have an integrated whole disk encryption and management server solution that is Common Criteria certified. PGP® Whole Disk Encryption is also the first disk encryption product to be awarded validation against Common Criteria Evaluation Scheme CC v3.1/CEM v3.1.

PGP® Whole Disk Encryption provides comprehensive, full disk encryption, enabling quick, cost-...

Protecting Data and Speeding Up the User Experience: all in a day’s work at Intel Developer Forum

Shilpi Dey | 05 Nov 2012 | 2 comments

Shilpi Dey - Product Marketing Manager

I spent the better part of last week at the Intel Developer Forum, a great forum that brings together various technology solution providers who are integrating the next generation of Intel technologies. It was exciting and an honor to showcase PGP® solutions for Intel® Anti-Theft and Intel® AES-NI.

Standing at the booth surrounded by dazzling demos and silicon chips, I was taken back to when I bought my first laptop almost a decade ago. It was from an online auction site and was advertised as “scrubbed clean”. On...

PGP Desktop Support for Snow Leopard

Tim_Matthews | 05 Nov 2012 | 19 comments

Like everyone in the Macintosh user community, we're excited by Apple's early Friday delivery of Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6). Unfortunately, like many applications at the moment, the currently shipping versions of PGP Desktop products (v 9.10) are not supported on Snow Leopard. This includes PGP Desktop Professional, PGP Desktop Home, PGP Desktop Email and PGP Whole Disk Encryption (a comprehensive list of Mac OS X applications and their status on Snow Leopard is available on the MacInTouch site).

While we are working diligently to complete the Snow Leopard compatible versions of the PGP Desktop products, we do not recommend you use the currently shipping versions on any system that has been upgraded to Snow Leopard. Please note that users wanting to migrate to Snow Leopard immediately must first decrypt all of their PGP WDE encrypted drives and uninstall their PGP...

Ensuring Disks are Encrypted

Doug McLean | 05 Nov 2012 | 0 comments

Q: I want to do an audit of my IT environment to see which machines are encrypted. I want to make sure the machine's encrypted, not just have PGP installed.

A: The best way to do this is to run a managed environment using PGP Universal. If, however, you're running an un-managed environment there are other ways to check. If you have physical access to the machine, go to the command line and type: pgpwde --status --disk 0. The response will tell you if the disk is instrumented with bootguard or not which indicates whether or not the disk is encrypted.

If you don't have physical access to the machine in question, but you can access via the 'net, you'll need to use the schtasks.exe command with something like this:

@echo off
...

Installing Whole Disk Encryption on a Previously Encrypted Drive

Doug McLean | 05 Nov 2012 | 0 comments

Q: After using various encryption solutions, we have chosen PGP as the best solution, but I have a couple of machines causing problems. These machines previously had another vendor's full disk encryption product installed on them, but they have been decrypted and the software uninstalled. PGP installs fine on the machines, but when Whole Disk Encryption is chosen, they come up with the following error :

'Another whole disk encryption product is installed. Please remove it before trying to encrypt your drive.'

I know that the recommended solution would be to re-image them, but this is going to cause problems with legacy software installed on a few of them. Is there another way round this ?

A: The most common cause of this issue is that the previously installed product was not completely uninstalled. Specifically, unless the system registry entries are cleaned up, PGP Whole Disk Encryption will believe that the...

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