Full Disk Encryption: A Comparison on Data Management Attributes

It is important to secure personally identifiable and confidential information stored on portable devices such as laptops, and smartphones. Data is more appealing for thieves than the hardware itself. Encryption is the paramount protection measure to secure the confidential data. Full disk encryption (FDE) is a technique used when there is need to encrypt the hole hard drive. There are different tools available which can perform the FDE through software or hardware. This paper investigates different issues of FDE and its impact on system's performance. An insight of FDE on different data presentation issues, security attacks, performance degradation, key management, energy consumption and cost effectiveness form part of this paper. With this comparison, an easy and concise view of the different performance enhancement attributes for the FDE is provided.