Want to protect your business files? Use TrueCrypt!

This entry is like atomic energy. There are good and bad uses for this encryption technology. Us honest folk can use it to make sure that we will never have our customer lists stolen or be the object of another stolen laptop or PC stolen story. The other side of the use is of course sending messages, or files that the government can’t break easily, but since the technology is widely available to e-mail PGP, and files steganography , hiding files in pictures I feel the good outweighs the possible bad uses. Protect your customers !
The program I am begging you to use is the open source file driver called; True Crypt is located here.

The download is a zip file that contains a TrueCrypt Setup.exe , and a tutorial that is a PDF file. From this file an excerpt reads “Files can be copied to and from a mounted TrueCrypt volume just like they are copied to/from any normal disk (for example, by simple drag-and-drop operations). Files are automatically being decrypted on-the-fly (in memory/RAM) while they are being read or copied from an encrypted TrueCrypt volume. Similarly, files that are being written or copied to the TrueCrypt volume are automatically being encrypted on-the-fly (right before they are written to the disk) in RAM. Note that this does not mean that the whole file that is to be encrypted/decrypted must be stored in RAM
before it can be encrypted/decrypted. The are no extra memory (RAM) requirements for TrueCrypt.”

The beginner portion of the tutorial describes the wizard that sets up your file vault that will act like a virtual drive on your system. In the olden days when all we had was a command line we used subst in the autoexec.bat. Come to think of it I still use subst to shorten my directory structure. Enough reminiscing about the good ol’ days when real men used a command line.

The RAM requirements for this file driver, and that is exactly what it is, is not more than for a normal file driver, CD-Rom Driver, external FireWire Disk Driver etc etc. I have done some tests on my Windows XP Pro System with 512 MB RAM and Athlon 64 3600 single core system and the cost of copying files from the TrueCrypt volume is no more than copying from my USB Pen Drive, or my DVD Drive, maybe not as fast as my hard drive, but certainly as fast as my USB 1.1 Port, or my DVD Drive can handle. The advantage here is that you can establish a TrueCrypt vault on a flash drive and keep it safely in your pants pocket and not on the laptop. But since this is a file driver and not an application you can not use the flash drive on another laptop and have it make sense unless the other laptop already has TrueCrypt installed, and the person with your flash drive knows your key.
So you have no reason to let sensitive data out on a laptop that can be seen by prying eyes, or used against you.

If you are a business user, then donate some paltry sum for saving you the embarrassment of being the next news story.

[tags]microface, Open Source, Encrypt, files, vault[/tags]