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Thinking about setting up a dedicated "secure PC" in my house.. Thoughts?

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SchoolDaGeek:
I have found www.gearxs.com to have really low prices on everything.  You can get a computer for $57.88 there.

mouser:
I have a question for those who use whole-disk encryption:  Do the whole-disk encryption schemes only do their thing at boot time -- so if the system were to go into standby or hibernation, and wake up, would everything be decrypted and stay decrypted until next boot? or do you have an option to have a timeout period after a few hours when the encryption can kick in again, etc.

I ask because I thought it might be a nice coding snack to request if not -- something that for example forced a laptop to reboot after waking from standby if some action wasn't taken immediately afterwards.

f0dder:
mouser: with FDE, everything is encrypted all the time - that's the beauty of it. There's no time when decrypted data is available on disk, only in RAM.

TrueCrypt has options to dismount volumes on user log-off and power-saving modes. That obviously won't work for your system partition, but that's protected by your regular windows user logon password (as far as I understand, you want to protect against burglars, not NSA and other people who can launch cold attacks against your RAM blocks to extract your decryption keys ;)).

mouser:
well what i was thinking in general is, if you have a laptop that you essentially never reboot -- ie you always close to standby and wake from standby (for quick access), then essentially any hard drive encryption that is unlocked at boot time is going to be mostly useless if your laptop is stolen and they dont reboot it, but merely resume from standby.

f0dder:
Useless, why? You'll obviously want to not change the Windows default of "prompt for password when resuming from standby" :)

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