macnn
05/28/2008, 11:40pm, EDT
Wednesday, May 28th
Check Point Full Disk Encryption for Mac
Check Point Technologies on Wednesday unveiled Check Point Full Disk Encryption for Mac OS X, offering users pre-boot authenticated disk encryption, what the company claims is an industry first. Since the security software encrypts the entire disk before the operating system boots, Check Point says the multi-certified cryptology engine adheres to many state and federal privacy laws, and can be deployed in any scale of operation. Check Point Full Disk Encryption starts at $120.
"Enterprises and organizations have to secure 100 percent of their laptops and desktops to be fully protected," said Bob Egner vice president of product management at Check Point. "Check Point recognizes that Mac OS has an important and growing place in the enterprise and is proud to offer enterprise customers endpoint solutions that cover all platforms and work in mixed environments."
Check Point claims the security features do not impact the user experience, and that they are manageable from a central location, increasing a business' profitability by simplifying maintenance and usability.
Filed under: security, software
Other story tags: Mac OS X, encryption, disk
, 
, 8
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
Top
subscribe to comments
for this article
OS X data encryption
How does this differ from Apple's File Vault which is included for free with OS X? Does Check Point encryption work with Time Machine? Does Check Point encryption program provide the ability to remote wipe data in case of theft?
actually the difference..
Difference is you can get around fire vault, the whole point of this piece of software is you cant do that using the same exploits, its far more secure. don't get me wrong Fire vault is very good for what it is, but its not comparable to this software.
No - the real difference
It encrypts the whole disk, not just your user folder. So files outside your home folder will also be protected, as well as any other user folders.
What about TrueCrypt
Doesn't TrueCrypt already do this, for free?
TrueCrypt
"Doesn't TrueCrypt already do this, for free?"
Nope.
TrueCrypt does FDE, but not for the boot volume.
This is the only solution from any vendor that does FDE for the boot volume (on Intel-based Macs). PGP has a forthcoming product for Intel-based Macs that does this as well.
wary
I would be a little wary of this product right now. Check Point doesn't have the best track record of supporting Mac users. Whenever a new OS has been released, such as from Panther to Tiger and Tiger to Leopard, their utils almost always had become broken and it took them many months to come up with updates, leaving Mac users hanging until they can spare a few engineers to update their wares.
I went through this recently with their SecureClient VPN-1 software, which our company uses. I wasn't able to update to Leopard for about 5 months after it was released, because Check Point hadn't updated it to work with Leopard, and VPN access is very important in my job. I can just see a future OS update breaking this program and suddenly you can't encrypt your disk anymore until they get around to updating it. THAT would be fun
file vault?
People actually use that? Considering the mess Apple made with it when they first released it, I've never had the guts to turn it on.
And when you do, you also have to know what programs need to be tweaked so they don't start writing large amounts of data to your encrypted drive. Big pain.
Now, Time Machine won't even back up the file vaulted drives if you're not logged in.