Once and Still a Techie Weblog

Truecrypt: The Ultimate in Personal Data Security

And it’s free too!

What I’m referring to is the Truecrypt disk encryption utility. I’ve been using it over a month now and it’s the simplest most convenient way to keep your data secure.

Truecrypt is on-the-fly disk encryption software using the most advanced encryption technology publicly available. One overkill feature of Truecrypt is it actually gives the option to chain ciphers to encrypt a volume. I mean come on folks AES is a strong cipher on its own. But the paranoid creators of this great piece of software provide an option to cascade ciphers (e.g. AES+Twofish, Serpent+AES, or AES+Twofish+Serpent). It’s been given a stamp of approval by no other than Steve Gibson, well-known in IT circles as a security guru who would use it “without hesitation”. Google him hehe. Truecrypt is also cross platform which means you can run it on Windows, Linux, or even MacOS.

What Truecrypt essentially does is create an encrypted volume to which you save your data. Once mounted, this volume would appear as a new drive letter and process “on the fly” data encryption/decryption to data going in or out of the volume. It can also encrypt an entire partition or entire device, which would come in handy if you wanted to encrypt for example your whole 2GB/4GB flash drive or SD/SDHC card. As long as you use a great password (20+ characters long with a mix of numbers and special characters) to protect the encrypted volume it would be inaccessible to anyone short of the NSA and mistook for a chunk of random data. I personally use a 6-letter password though which I’d say is pretty good enough. Come on I’m not exactly hiding information which if exposed would be a threat to national security here.

The Windows version of Truecrypt provides the option to create hidden volumes so a scan of your hard drive wouldn’t be able to detect it unless it was mounted which allows for plausible deniability. Let’s say the CIA were to storm your house looking for a Word document that would implicate you in a “world domination” master plan. You could easily dismiss their charges and say “What file? Never heard of it, never saw it. Do you see it?” and actually be believable.

The latest version of Truecrypt is 5.1a. For more information you can scoot over to the Truecrypt wiki or it’s home website to download and read up.