Mac – the Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) volume encryption standard

disk-volumeencryptionmac

I have found countless blogs and tutorials how to encrypt an external drive using Mac's extended journaled encrypted format, but I couldn't find anybody stating the standard behind it. I know that FireVault 2 uses XTS-AES 128 encryption, but is that the same used for the external format or are the hard/flash drives simply assigned with a mounting password? Any link for clarification or simply a statement would be very appreciated.

Best Answer

  1. Open Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and type:

    disktutil cs list

  2. Then look for the entry of your standard drive, e.g.

    Name:                    Macintosh HD

  3. Look further down to find out the encryption type:

    Encryption Type:         AES-XTS

The latter is what I see when using this command in OS X 10.8.2, so you can assume that AES-XTS stands for the AES-XTS 128-bit encryption used in Mountain Lion.

I expect Lion to use the same encryption model, but I can't verify it because I have no Mac that's running Lion. However, the diskutil command should help you to find the definite answer.

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