It wasn’t so long ago that most people didn’t really think about encryption. It was something you’d see in the movies, seen as unnecessary to all but the most paranoid or “the government” or military. Even though you might not know it, many of us now rely on encryption every single day. If you’ve ever bought something on a website or done online banking, then you’ve used encryption. Without it, these things would be too risky to be practical.
As more of us become comfortable with these sorts of technologies, protecting our data becomes increasingly important. My uncle used to store important documents in a strongbox in his basement. Some people used safes or safety deposit boxes. While these things still serve an important purpose when it comes to safeguarding physical objects, they can’t help us when it comes to storing sensitive data in digital form practically. Personal encryption is not exactly new, but it’s never been quite as easy as it is with TrueCrypt.
TrueCrypt is a free and open source application that provides on-the-fly encryption for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. It supports several different methods of encryption, the easiest of which is simply creating a file which acts as a container which TrueCrypt mounts as a virtual hard drive. Anything you copy into that container is automatically encrypted. Decryption is done on the fly and in the background and you can access your files just as you would normally. This is how I’ve been using it so far, it’s a great way to store your sensitive documents or anything you don’t want prying eyes to see. I haven’t noticed any performance issues either – I’ve tried opening audio and video files from within the encrypted volume and they all played fine.
If you want to get a little fancier, you can encrypt your entire system in place. TrueCrypt will encrypt your entire hard drive, and before starting Windows you’ll be prompted for your password. I’ll probably end up doing this at some point, just to be on the safe side. This is also an excellent option if you have a laptop – you don’t have to worry about anyone accessing your data if your computer is stolen.
For the truly paranoid, TrueCrypt allows you to create a hidden volume within a standard encrypted volume. Depending on the password you use to access the volume, it will load either the outer (decoy) volume or the true (hidden) one. The idea here is to give you some options if you are ever in a situation where you are being forced to provide your password. The hidden volume is indistinguishable from random data/free space, so you can just provide the password for the decoy volume and plausibly deny the existence of anything else. The more recent versions of TrueCrypt also support booting an operating system from a hidden volume, so you can extend the above scenario to entire system encryption!
TrueCrypt is free, open source and extremely easy to use. Keep your data safe by downloading and installing TrueCrypt!
