Truecrypt is one of my favorite applications. It makes encrypting your files so easy that you could teach your grandma to do it (just try). It has a ton going for it: it’s free, open source, and it’s available on all the major operating systems. TrueCrypt works by creating a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounting it as a real disk in order to encrypt the file’s contents. By doing this, TrueCrypt is able to encrypt a file, directory, partition, or entire storage device. TrueCrypt also includes both an access password and a decryption key in order to provide files with more security than other encryption methods, causing encrypted files to show only random data until they have been decrypted. TrueCrypt is advantageous because it provides real time encryption without slowing down the CPU, so you won’t even notice that it’s running. TrueCrypt also provides parallelization and pipelining to increase the access speed to encrypted files. Another great advantage of TrueCrypt, if configured properly and used with full disk encryption, is that it can provide plausible deniability to any user who has been forced to reveal his/her password. So let’s get right into it… [Read more...]

Truecrypt is one of my favorite applications. It makes encrypting your files so easy that you could teach your grandma to do it (just try). It has a ton going for it: it’s free, open source, and it’s available on all the major operating systems.

TrueCrypt works by creating a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounting it as a real disk in order to encrypt the file’s contents. By doing this, TrueCrypt is able to encrypt a file, directory, partition, or entire storage device. TrueCrypt also includes both an access password and a decryption key in order to provide files with more security than other encryption methods, causing encrypted files to show only random data until they have been decrypted. TrueCrypt is advantageous because it provides real time encryption without slowing down the CPU, so you won’t even notice that it’s running. TrueCrypt also provides parallelization and pipelining to increase the access speed to encrypted files.

Another great advantage of TrueCrypt, if configured properly and used with full disk encryption, is that it can provide plausible deniability to any user who has been forced to reveal his/her password.

So let’s get right into it…

[Read more...]