TrueCrypt - open-source disk encryption

Posted on March 19, 2006 One Comment

Man, I hope these snow forecasts are even somewhat close to reality…

Been playing with TrueCrypt a bit this afternoon. Peter has mentioned it to me a few times via IM. It was mentioned on this week’s Security Now podcast. Seemed like I should have a look based on what I was hearing.

The install is simple and setting up an encrypted volume is pretty simple as well. And you get choices — a volume can be an actual partition of a hard drive or it can be stored as a file. The latter option makes it very easy to move encrypted data around via USB drives. There are a fair number of options related to encryption types and not much guidance as to which one you might want to go with if among the uninitiated. Having a look at the User Guide (pdf warning) first wouldn’t be a bad idea… it starts with a nice little Beginner’s Tutorial.

The software itself runs down in the tray and makes it easy to mount and unmount encrypted volumes. Apparently some of the magic is done via device drivers as once a volume is mounted, you can treat it just like a physical drive (or partition). I’m not exactly sure of total memory footprint yet, but the trueCrypt.exe process is running at about 8MB so not too terrible for a tray app. Now, because we have device drivers in the mix, I’m guessing I won’t be throwing a truecrypt volume on a thumb drive and be expecting to access it from any random computer. Gotta install the software first then that will work just fine (and feel free to holler if you’re reading this and know otherwise!).

Using a TrueCrypt volume is dead simple. Use the tray app to mount it as a drive. Copy stuff to and fro. Marvel at how simple it is. Really, there’s not much to mess up. I know have a nice little package of my QuickBooks backups safely stored away on a USB drive. As my primary work machine is a laptop, I think I’ll be moving a LOT of the documents on it to an encrypted volume as well. Just seems logical.

Long story short, I like it. I’ve used other products in the past (paid, free and open source) and none of ‘em really “stuck” well enough to keep using them. TrueCrypt can work so simply and painlessly that it just seems like a no-brainer. I do need to read up on the automount options a bit first and make sure I understand the options. I’d like to be able to automount a volume when I log in on the laptop. I’d assume I’d get an extra password prompt?

Tags: encryption, security, security-now, TrueCrypt