![]() All Macs with T2 chips, with the exception of the Mac Pro 2019, have internal storage which is soldered into place to make its removal challenging. The T2 chip acts as the storage controller for the internal SSD, so all data transferred between the Intel processor and SSD passes through an encryption stage in the T2’s hardware. To achieve that, T2 and M1 chips incorporate secure enclaves and perform encryption and decryption in hardware, rather than using CPU cycles. One of Apple’s goals in adding the T2 chip to Intel Macs, and in the design of Apple Silicon chips like the M1 series, is to make encrypted volumes the default. Most users try to avoid doing this too often as a result, so, while FileVault is secure and effective, it isn’t as widely used as it should be. Turning FileVault on and off is quite a pain, as the whole volume has to be encrypted or decrypted in the background, a process which takes many hours or even days. This imposes significant overhead of around 3%, which is more noticeable on slower storage such as hard disks, and with slower Macs. All recent Intel processors have instructions to make this easier and quicker, but all data written to an encrypted volume has to be encrypted before it’s written to disk, and all data read from it has to be decrypted before it can be used. Encryption is performed using the XTS-AES mode of AES with a 256-bit key, by the CPU. Even on old Macs, you shouldn’t assume that FileVault 1 provides any significant protection to your data.įileVault 2 was introduced in Mac OS X 10.7, and provides whole-volume encryption based on the user password. These caused problems with Time Machine backups, and have proved comparatively easy to crack. In what’s now often referred to as FileVault 1 or Legacy FileVault, only Home folders were encrypted into a sparsebundle. Since Mac OS X 10.3, when Apple released the first version of FileVault, you’ve been able to encrypt some of the contents of internal storage. FileVault is the name Apple gives its features which encrypt stored data, so that no one else can gain access to it. If your Mac is stolen or lost, the last thing you’d want someone else to have is access to all that data. ![]() Most of us keep lots of sensitive personal data stored on our Macs.
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