An Implementation and Evaluation of Online Disk Encryption for Windows Systems

The threat of loss of privacy of data due to the theft of hard disks requires that the data in hard disks is protected by means of encryption. In this paper we propose an implementation of a disk-driver-based sector level encryption for windows platforms. The implementation provides for strong security to the data at the sector-level, independent of the mounted file-system. The encryption of data is done at the granularity of partitions, leaving aside the boot partition, thus not affecting system boot-up process. Adapting a scheme proposed in the literature, the initialization vector is kept different for different sectors and is changed every time the sector is written into. The complete implementation is tested and evaluated using standard benchmark suites. The paper ends with a discussion on the usability of the implementation and future directions of its development.