I originally had a category for software in this blog because I wanted to rant and rave about little-known software that I use, and I seem to have forgotten about that lately.
So this post here is dedicated to TrueCrypt. Truecrypt is a Windows program lets you encrypt drives on your PC so they can only be accessed after entering a keyphrase, very much like PGPdrive, only better and free.
Why do I need something like this? To tell the truth, not everything on my work PC is work-related, there’s quite a bit of private information on my PC. Why should that priate stuff be readable for anybody who can get my computer? I’ve taken over computers from previous employees myself, and found their personal data still on the hard drive.
TrueCrypt has two different ways of drive encryption. You can either create a virtual drive inside a large file in the regular filesystem and mount it, or encrypt an entire partition (which is what I do). It offers a wide range of encryption methods, and even lets you create hidden volumes which provide you with plausible deniability.
Using TrueCrypt drives is very smooth. They are a little slower than regular hard disk access, but I’m not storing swap files there, so it doesn’t really matter at all. The only thing I would like is remounting of drives after login, and a way to keep shared folders on the drive shared from one session to the next. Right now, when Windows boots, it finds that the drive no longer exists and removes the share.
I am not into encryption, but I found your review and got interested in this software. Which encryption algorithm did you chose?
I picked AES encryption. TrueCrypt lets you benchmark the different algorithms on your machine, which is nice since the encryption will cost you speed when you access the drive, naturally.