MacOS – OpenPGP encryption of mails in Mountain Lion

It is faster in practice when writing changes to the disk - the new block encryption is hard to measure (meaning it's a negligible slowdown).

The new implementation removes nearly all of the compacting, and delay in creating and tearing down an encrypted space. It generally allows you to continue working while the bit grinding happens in the background.

The effort to shift a whole drive to encrypted blocks happens in the background while you can still use the mac but it's no different than waiting to turn on or off the old encryption.

In practice the new is far better performing across the board and has less times when you have to wait for it to do some long operation.

According to a public talk by Rich Trouton, FileVault 2 is not FIPS 140-2 validated, but "Apple's new Common Crypto implementation is just starting to undergo FIPS evaluation"

The code itself for Common Crypto is available at http://www.opensource.apple.com/ and has been all the way back to 10.4 (where I got tired of checking revisions - it probably goes back even further, but what matters is the code shipped in Lion which is available for all three lion releases 10.7, 10.7.1 and 10.7.2)