Vickoid
Level 1 (8 points)
Mac OS X

Q: Filevault encryption

I disabled filevault encryption on my mac because I read somewhere that it can slow things down. And actaullyl since I did this, things have sped up again. But do I need FileVault really? I actulaly don't really know what it is! Is my machine safe without it? It's just a personal laptop with nothing of importance on it...

MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2012), OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)

Posted on Jun 14, 2016 1:16 AM

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Vickoid

Q: Filevault encryption

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  • Helpful answers

  • by Esquared,

    Esquared Esquared Jun 14, 2016 1:23 AM in response to Vickoid
    Level 6 (8,410 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jun 14, 2016 1:23 AM in response to Vickoid

    If there's really nothing of importance on it, it isn't very important. But without FileVault anyone that has physical access to your Mac will be able to retrieve information from it – even without knowing the login password. FileVault prevents that by encrypting everything on the disk. (See my reply to the other topic you just started: now you disabled FileVault the 'keychain' problem is solved too.)

  • by appreciate,

    appreciate Jun 14, 2016 1:58 AM in response to Vickoid
    Level 4 (1,276 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jun 14, 2016 1:58 AM in response to Vickoid

    By enabling file vault it prevents accessing data on your encrypted drive without the permission of the user or to say your entire data will be encrypted .

    also FileVault full-disk encryption (FileVault 2) uses XTS-AES 128 encryption to help prevent unauthorized access to the information on your startup disk.

  • by Vickoid,

    Vickoid Vickoid Jun 14, 2016 5:23 AM in response to appreciate
    Level 1 (8 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jun 14, 2016 5:23 AM in response to appreciate

    Thank you!

  • by John Lockwood,

    John Lockwood John Lockwood Jun 14, 2016 8:57 AM in response to Vickoid
    Level 6 (9,255 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Jun 14, 2016 8:57 AM in response to Vickoid

    You need FileVault if you work with customer/client/patient files. If your Mac is solely for personal use and not involving anything that you would be concerned about loosing and hence being visible to potentially undesirable people then you don't need FileVault. However if you do have client etc. information on the computer then you normally have a legal responsibility to protect that data and encryption is the obvious way to achieve this.

     

    FileVault will off-load the encryption/decryption task to a purpose made part of a CPU if your Mac is new enough to have a CPU with that functionality built-in. If your Mac has an i5 or i7 CPU then it is likely to have such dedicated hardware. If it is an older Mac with either a Core2Duo or a Xeon processor then it might not have such dedicated hardware, in which case this work has to be done in software by the general purpose part of the CPU and will therefore be a little slower.

     

    Apple have chosen to only use 128bit AES encryption rather than 256bit encryption this means even in this worst case the potential slowdown is not as bad. Typically the amount referred to is only a 5% performance loss if your Mac has a CPU with built-in AES support.

     

    See http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/10/filevault-2-benchmarks-disk-encryption-faster-mac -os-x-lion/

     

    If you have an SSD drive rather than a spinning hard disk then the difference is literally unnoticeable.

  • by Vickoid,

    Vickoid Vickoid Jun 19, 2016 6:13 AM in response to John Lockwood
    Level 1 (8 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jun 19, 2016 6:13 AM in response to John Lockwood

    THank you very much for taking the time to respond to me in such detail. It's been really helpful. THANKS!