PGP - how strong?

Hi all,

My company handles very sensitive business information for our customers. We often travel, carrying some of this information on laptops. But if a laptop gets stolen or lost, you can imagine the headaches. So, my question is, how effective is full disk encryption from ie. PGP? Has it been broken (not talking about guessing the code)? How long would an estimated time be if the highest possible encryption and key is used?

and what woul be faster in terms of decrypt/encrypt efficiency? put all data on a vmware image and only encrypt that or an entire physical disk?. I lean more towards the vmware image..

All I can say about my company (who uses PGP) is that even very large companies use PGP.

And even though I run an XP VM for the client I support, my company requires the entire HDD, all Cd/Dvd's to be burned with it PGP encrypted and any and all flash drives and external hard drives to be fully encrypted with it too.

Though I wish the hdd performance was better, Win7 started up in a matter of a minute and a half until PGP was installed and the whole hard drive was encrypted, now it takes the same laptop 6 minutes to load Win7, but once it's booted, I hardly notice it at all, even starting vmware and winxp loads like a normal system.

I would suggest looking into TrueCrypt. It is a very good implementation of multiple encryption schemes and handles full drive encryption. It is free, and open source.

http://www.truecrypt.org/

Given enough time, all encryption can be broken using brute force. It is just that very large passwords are impractical. To best illustrate, consider brute force using 1 million password attempts per second against this 27 character password:

ThisIsASampleOfABigPassword

... would take 604,673,395,347,993,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 years to crack. That was not iterations or all attempts across the whole keyspace; it is years to crack that phrase.

Few have the time to wait it out. :D

Q

Pretty sure HUSHMAIL uses it, and I found a link somewhere saying that it HAS been broken, about 9 months ago. Didn't save it.