Full disk encryption on OpenBSD 5.3
Full disk encryption is becoming (it should always have been) more popular. When your laptop gets stolen, a login password is only a minor inconvenience to a hacker trying to steal your identity. Pop in a live CD or USB stick with Knoppix or Backtrack (or in fact basically any Linux distribution) and all your information is there for the attacker to use to steal your identity, impersonate you online and perhaps even empty your bank accounts. By booting not into the installed operating system, but into their own, the computer obeys the attacker and any protection your login password could have offered is irrelevant as the installed operating system isn’t running. If an attacker has physical access to a machine and enough time, it becomes the attacker’s machine, but the data doesn’t have to become that attacker’s data. This is where full disk encryption comes in.