home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Media Share 9
/
MEDIASHARE_09.ISO
/
private
/
mpc93mar.zip
/
DISKLOCK.DAT
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1993-02-17
|
4KB
|
76 lines
Security with Disklock Version 3.1
Review by Dale D. Moser Sr.
Name of Product: Disklock version 3.1
Maker: Fifth Generation Systems, Inc.
10049 N. Reiger Road
Baton Rouge LA. 70809
BBS 1,504,2953344 1200/n,8,1
Type of Product: Data Security
Rating: ** (Passable, better than nothing) for general user
* (Poor) if you are serious about complex computing problems
with large amounts of data.
Requires: dos 2.1 -> 5.0 512k ram and a hard drive.
Test system: PS2/80 386/20mhz machine 16 meg memory 240 meg dual hard disk.
Noticed considerable performance degradation accessing data.
Summary:
Disklock protects your pc from unauthorized entry by assigning a
password. without this password, your data cannot be accessed.
Disklock arms you with two powerful locking features, encryption and
lock. A log is generated to warn the owner of unauthorized access
attempts. disklock provides you with a screen blanker. It locks your
system either by keystroke or timeout. This program is for the casual
user that does not have a complex system, but needs to protect
business data. It is not for machines that have complex memory
management or disk cache/stacking.
Evaluation:
I have worked with U.S. Govt. computer data security issues since
1958, so this product fit right into my area of interest. It does
everything advertised for hard disk users, but is lacking the same
protection for removable media. (Bernoulli box's). Removable hard
drives represent a standard way of doing business with U.S. Govt.
classified data. During the installation process, this program
encrypts the hard disk and obtains a password from the primary user.
The password is unknowingly forced to upper case and is case sensitive
(an undocumented feature). If the user enters a lower case password,
the result is a disk that he/she cannot access unless the user figures
out the reversal of case. the install process will generate a key disk
that is sensitive to the machine that was just installed. The key
disk is the users backout mechanism if he/she changes their mind
about this process.
If the user attempts to defeat the locking by booting from a floppy
disk, it is not apparent that there is a hard disk in the machine.
Warnings with the documentation state the installation modifies the
hard disk file allocation tables. Users that have multiple operating
systems (DOS and UNIX) on the same machine (which is my case) should
not use this program. The UNIX region will be corrupted. For users
that have large amounts of information like satellite image's (again
my case) there is a limitation of 200 files for the DES encryption
options.
I attempted to use fifth generation's bulletin board system to obtain
information on the Govt. certification process for their DES
encryption. A week expired, and I had not received a response back
from the sysop. I also tried to find out from U.S. Govt. security
agencies if this program is approved/certified for machines
containing classified data. I could not receive that verification.
There are two encryption schemes. One is identified as proprietary
and one is DES. I tried to encrypt under one and decrypt under the
other and it worked. I expected that data should have been unreadable
switching schemes. If you are using spinwrite on the same machine,
your disk will become unbootable. Novel Lantastic servers or nodes
are incompatible and there are problems co-residing with some memory
managers like QEMM386.