Tim Flight

About once per week I try to take a look at security and crack down on any vulnerabilities I can find. Sometimes it is as simple as shredding documents lying around while other times it is something like further restricting access to certain points on my server.

Today I’ve been thinking that it would be really bad if my laptop was ever stolen. I watch over it like a hawk and religiously backup data, however if it was stolen I could be in some big trouble.

Sure I’ve got it setup so it requires a username and password to login, but that will only go so far. I don’t use FileValut because it was buggy when first released, I don’t trust it to not become corrupt, and I’m always afraid the encryption/decryption process will slow down the computer. Maybe someone should just convince me it is okay to use.

So here is what I’m thinking. One area of weakness is my Keychain. I currently have over 500 passwords stored. A huge problem if someone got into that. So I’ve been thinking about moving it to an external, biometric flash drive. Then keep the keychain and my laptop physically separated as much as possible. When I start to work plugin the flash drive, scan my fingerprint, and start working. When I’m done shutdown the computer, remove the flash drive and keep them separate.

In this manner if my laptop is stolen at least nobody will be able to access any passwords.

So, has anyone moved a keychain to an external device? Does it work okay? I figure maybe even creating a symbolic link to the external drive might work? I know you can use your keychain on a different computer so using it on an external drive shouldn’t be much different? Am I missing anything? It won’t take much effort to try and see if it works and I’ll report back here when I do.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 27th, 2006 at 7:03 pm and is filed under Computer Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.