Secude Secure Notebook

This product was unique in that the hard drive encryption software recommended encrypting only those clusters of the hard drive that had data on them, leaving the other sectors unencrypted. This speeds the time for hard drive encryption, but reduces overall data security.

In addition, the product has a unique feature that locks the keyboard during the booting process to stop an intruder from booting the system into safe-mode and attempting to bypass any of the security components.

At three hours, the Secure Notebook took the longest of the products that we tested to encrypt the entire 60 GB drive. However, once the drive was encrypted, the Performance Test software reported no performance degradation.

Getting the USB token to work proved to be a difficult process. The software required for the token reader was not included on the installation media and was not available from the website. The software was needed to read the smart card used for the pre-boot authentication. Eventually we used password authentication and found the rest of the installation to be much easier.

The product creates a second Linux partition that is used as part of the pre-boot authentication process. Secure Notebook was the only product tested that created such a partition; however, the new partition was left in plain text and could be read from a bootable Linux CD.

Documentation for this product is in the form of four PDF files that are a bit difficult to navigate.

Secude offers phone and email support, but very little in the way of online support. Better user guides and inclusion of a FAQ page on the support site, as well as a quick start guide would help.

Priced in the middle of the products that we tested, Secude provides many of the features commonly associated with whole disk encryption products.