[BBLISA] Looking for FDE single system windows 8

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2015, John Orthoefer wrote:

> I’ve been getting OPAL Self encrypting drives.  Since we support so many 
> OSes finding a solution that works for everything has been hard.  But 
> OPAL on any standard PC hardware should just work.

Can you say something about how the self-encrypted system appears to 
users? When do they enter the password? What software asks for the 
password? Is it an alternate boot loader? You mention that any standard PC 
hardware should work, but sometimes I have seen it said that the BIOS must 
support encryption - is that false or an alternative arrangement? How is 
the password established? Is there a Windows program that one runs to turn 
on encryption and establish the key? Is there a similar Linux program? Can 
a drive move from Windows to Linux without losing the data?

The vendor literature is long on the benefits, but short description.

Daniel Feenberg
NBER