Ed Felten Defeats Hard Drive Encryption

Felten and a group of colleagues have now shown that hard disk encryption is incredibly easy to beat. This should be a huge concern, considering how many people and organizations rely on data encryption to protect important data. In fact, with many of the "lost" hard drive stories over the past few years, many organizations have insisted the risk was minimal, since the data was all encrypted.

As the video notes, this won't work on some systems if the computer is turned completely off and the encryption package opens up before the operating system boots -- but otherwise, most systems are vulnerable.