Overhead and Performance Impact when Using Full Drive Encryption with HP ProtectTools and SSD

Transcription

1 After some weeks of waiting, I received my new HP EliteBook 8440p with the following parameters: Processor type Intel Core i7-620m Processor (2.66 GHz, 4 MB L3 cache) Operating system installed Windows 7 Professional 32 Chipset Mobile Intel QM57 Express Memory Standard memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 SDRAM Memory slots 2 SODIMM slots supporting dual channel memory Storage Internal drives 160 GB 2.5-inch Solid State Drive As a security professional, I prefer having all my drives and information securely encrypted on my laptop so that in case of theft or loss, all my sensitive data stays safe. The first tool, which comes to one's mind is BitLocker - the Microsoft encryption tool, which was made available in Windows Vista for the first time. Unfortunately my Windows 7 Professional supplied together with my laptop does not support BitLocker as it is available in the Ultimate and Enterprise versions of Windows 7 only. After an inquiry by HP, if it is possible to get an update from Windows 7 Professional to Windows 7 Ultimate, it became clear that I should basically buy a brand new Windows 7 Ultimate license. So I started looking for alternatives. 1 / 5

2 One alternative provided directly by HP are the HP ProtectTools, which offer credentials management and drive encryption (seems though to encrypt only the OS partition), so we will name it an OS drive encryption. Before encrypting my drive with the HP ProtectTools Drive Encryption, I performed a benchmark on my hard drive (160 GB SSD) in order to see what are the benchmark results without encryption. These results have then been compared with the benchmark tests performed after the OS drive encryption. I found a really nice and easy-to-use tool named ATTO Disk Benchmark v.2.41 and started a benchmark by using the default setup of the tool (as it was reasonably configured). The following screenshot whows the results of the benchmark without encryption in place: The application performed tests for reading and writing different sized chucks of data (between 0.5 and 8192 KB). The total size of the chunks was 256MB per chunk test. Before HP ProtectTools Drive Encryption 2 / 5

3 The average value between all the tests with all 15 chunks when writing on the hard drive is 84,73 MB per second (86759,4KB/s) The average value between all the tests with all 15 chunks when reading from the hard drive is 189,36 MB per second (193909,5KB/s) This test was performed once again in order to ensure that these results are not only temporary effect of the current state of the system. Then I enabled the HP ProtectTools Drive Encrytion. This was a simple process involving little number of mouse clicks. After about two hours, the hard drive was successfully encrypted and the system was booted. After another boot up of the system, the benchmark was executed again. The results this time looked quite different. The benchmark configuration was the same as in the previous test. The following screenshot shows the results after the encryption was performed: After HP ProtectTools Drive Encryption The average value between all the tests with all 15 chunks when writing on the hard drive is 74,32 MB per second 3 / 5

4 (76106,3KB/s) The average value between all the tests with all 15 chunks when reading from the hard drive is 57,32 MB per second (58694,5KB/s) Interestingly, the read performance has dropped drastically. Read operations take even more time than write operations in opposite to what we saw in the previous test where no encryption was available. Final Results: Procedure No Drive Encryption HP Protect Tools Drive Encryption Read Speed 189,36 MB/s 57,32 MB/s Write Speed 84,73 MB/s 74,32 MB/s For my system, the data transfer performance loss is immense: It is over 12% performance loss when writing and almost 70% performance loss when reading from the encrypted drive. Having such a great overhead makes me think twice if it is a smart solution to use this drive encryption for my system. 4 / 5

5 For users who can afford to encrypt just certain data like certain files and folders and do not necessarily have to encrypt their whole disk, then I would still recommend using freeware tools offering encrypted cotnainers, which can be mounted on demand - such astruecrypt. 5 / 5