PGP is planning to release a version of its whole disk encryption software for Apple Macintosh computers running OS X.
Jon Callas, PGP's chief technology officer, told ZDNet.com.au sister site CNET news.com on Monday that the software is "in active development" and will run on Intel-based Macs. However, Callas didn't want to elaborate on a shipping date.
This promises to be a boon for OS X users, especially laptop users who are more likely to lose their machines. Currently, there's no way for OS X users to encrypt their entire boot disks.
OS X already features FileVault, but that focuses on encrypting the user's home directory. Without whole-disk encryption, Unix-derived systems including OS X store in unencrypted form details about VPN usage, login times, and what applications are installed in the default location. Some applications including Thunderbird save working copies of documents in an unencrypted area outside the home directory.
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Another problem with FileVault is that it hasn't always been implemented securely. Earlier versions of OS X didn't encrypt the swapfile used for virtual memory, meaning the password could in many cases be easily extracted. And a paper (click for PDF) published last year by Jacob Appelbaum and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann found other potential security weaknesses.
PGP released its whole disk encryption utility for Windows in May 2005. A perpetual licence for PGP Whole Disk Encryption 9.8 for Windows costs US$149.
A free volume encryption utility called TrueCrypt was released for OS X last week (it was previously available for Windows and Linux). TrueCrypt doesn't offer whole disk encryption, but it does put forward a way to conceal that an encrypted volume exists -- although that feature isn't yet available on OS X and Linux.
