Truecrypt
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Review, Software
Well the newest addition to my software collection is TrueCrypt, an amazing open-source application supporting on-the-fly encryption.
Oh and did I mention its totally free and takes all of 5 min to setup. Unless that is, if you start poking around in their extensive online documentation - then you’re stuck for the better part of an hour. :P
The download was totally painless as the whole program is less then 5 MB, (only a 1.5MB rar download), and getting is setup is equally as painless if you follow the Beginners Tutorial step by step. There are quite a few options so just diving in, is probably not recommended unless you know a lot more about encryption, or just have a much higher risk tolerance towards the word “format”.
TrueCrypt has a couple of options when it comes to security precautions, you can have just the conventional password, (20 characters being the recommended, up to a maximum character amount of 64!), use a “keyfile”, or a combination of the both for ultimate security. The advantage of using a key file is that unless the user knows that they have to add a keyfile, they will keep getting innocent error messages from TrueCrypt. The keyfile can also be just a regular pre-existing file on your drive, which TrueCrypt does not modify - it just uses up to the first 1024KB. So as you will of course have other files on the drive, you can just use one (or more) as your keyfile. When combining that kind of security with a 20-30 character password, all I can really say is….Wow good luck!
So for me, I have a 3.99GB (maximum file size on a FAT partition) encrypted volume and I have enough space to run the unencrypter from the same drive, (it’s portable of course).
For anyone who read the Digg article on whether or not a defendant can be forced to divulge the password to his laptop, TrueCrypt also has the solution to the problem. By creating a hidden volume inside your encrypted volume, you have a plausible deniability on the questionable contents that may be stored on the drive.
Not that I am advocating child porn of course.
And if you havn’t been on Digg before, well, what can I say..
Tags: Encryption, Portable, Software, USB
