Hello, on my work laptop, the hard drives have got this little key symbol on top. Does this mean the hard disk of the laptops are encrypted, and whenever my laptop boots up it decrypts the drive to present it to the user, that is me?
It could be. You're laptop might have a TPM module in it - so if you remove the hard drive and try to use it in another system, it won't work.
DRM is the wrong word...... If someone is trying to maintain copyright... yes... But the DRM goals of the TPM have been highly over conspired and have since died off. TPM was only ever meant to be leveraged as a security mechanism for local authentication to the system, and storage of some sensitive data on the chip rather than the drive...ie; certificates. If they are leveraging the TPM in a proper fashion, it may be hardware bound to the system- though in practice, I know of no company doing that. It creates serious support issues they don't want to take on. More than likely, they are using a software disk encryption package that is transparent to the end user other than that little icon. That's kinda stupid, as if they've done nothing to enhance the security of the windows login GINA then they are wasting in part anyway, the time, effort and cost to implement what they are doing. Is it a new laptop? Could be one of the new Seagate or Hitachi FDE drives with hardware encryption built in..... There again, drive is encrypted but if you don't have an HD password set at minimum, you might as well not splurge on the 20-25 dollar pop in price for the FDE drive. Best practices.... are rarely followed.
For an accurate discussion of TPM in simple terms, this is pretty lucid. TPM TPM is not necessarily in play unless you have the OS that supports it - i.e., Vista Ultimate or Enterprise w/Bit Locker installed. Specifically, what OEM and model is your laptop, and what is the oEM and model of the HDD in question?
