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So, with file-based encryption, one user could decrypt their files and still leave another user’s data locked up. Each user can define which of their files are encrypted, and with which passwords.
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With file-level encryption, your full OS enforces the distinctions for what gets decrypted and when. A successful boot requires the whole block device to be unlocked, and once the disk is unlocked, it’s all open. But along with the user files, all the files the OS needs to run are also locked.
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Because the full disk is encrypted under full-disk encryption, a user who knows the disk decryption password has to enter it before anything else can proceed. It also allows users to augment file encryption with file permission controls. To start with, all your encrypted files are already understood as being files, meaning they can be decrypted individually. This, as the name implies, occurs at the level of the filesystem, which is one level up from where full-disk encryption is operative.
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This way, the core system files and software binaries for running programs are left alone, and only your actual personal data is guarded. To be precise, the model I have in mind is one which encrypts only the user documents, media, and other files which on Unix systems would end up in the user’s subdirectory under the /home directory. For our purposes, though, we will consider the kind of file-based encryption that lets users choose which files and directories to encrypt, leaving the rest alone.
Filesystem-level encryption can also encrypt an entire filesystem, automatically protecting everything that gets saved on it. folders) and all the files and directories within them, recursively down to everything that the uppermost directory ultimately contains. Under filesystem-level encryption, also called “file-based encryption,” a system encrypts certain directories (i.e. The answer is filesystem-level encryption. So what exactly is this disk encryption that isn’t full-disk encryption?
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The filesystem serves as a kind of org chart that tells your computer how to tell what bytes go together to make up files, and how to tell files and file types apart. This level is higher than the electrical signal level, but below the filesystem, the latter of which is the point at which your computer sees bytes as files instead of just bytes. We will refer to this as the block device level, since the full-disk encryption is applied to the block device that is a hard drive partition (just a fancy name for a large segment of your hard drive). In general, full-disk encryption is implemented on a level of computer complexity that deals with how raw bytes, decoupled from the context of information representation, are organized on the hard drive. Think of data at rest as the data you keep on some kind of storage medium (like a hard drive) for use later, not the kind of data that is moving over some communication channel like the Internet (that would be data in transit). Today, full-disk encryption is by far the most common kind of encryption scheme for data at rest. They are admittedly a bit off the beaten path, as most consumer tech companies have adopted full-disk encryption, but they’re out there. This isn’t just a matter of efficiency or load times, but literal increased cost to users, too.Īlternatives exist which afford normal everyday users, with normal everyday security concerns, a level of protection commensurate with what full-disk encryption offers. These users enjoy no measurable gain in security compared to alternative data at rest encryption, yet they pay for it with a measurable performance hit. What I contend is that, for most people facing the overwhelmingly most common use cases, full-disk encryption is overkill.
That’s why I’m not arguing against encryption, period but specifically against full-disk encryption, and only for certain users. I am in no way about to talk you out of using encryption - without it, the digital tools that we rely on every day would be unusable. I know this might sound crazy, since I’m kind of the security guy here, but hear me out. I’m here to make the case that most of you are better off not using it. This is the encryption that ensures that someone who snatches your device won’t be able to know everything you’ve got saved on it. One of the highest on this list is full-disk encryption, which security experts regard as sacrosanct, a no-brainer that everyone should use at the barest of minimums. Like with any industry, the information security industry, more commonly referred to as “cybersecurity,” for all its raging debates, has rallied around a small corpus of best practices.
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