truecrypt

I am always on the backfoot when it comes to handing out my personal USB or external HDD to my colleagues or even nearest of my friends since my data is lying open there and any one can just copy or view it. If you face similar situation like me you can consider TrueCrypt which is a light and open source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. TrueCrypt has been downloaded 10,114,479 times; wow it’s popular! Why were we missing it yet.

So how does it work? TrueCrypt creates an Encrypted Virtual Disk (EVD) within a file and mounts it as a real disk. So when you put some data in to EVD it is automatically encrypted on the fly. On-the-fly encryption means that data is automatically encrypted or decrypted right before it is loaded or saved, without any user intervention. Data stored on encrypted disk can only be read if you provide authorization password. You can not even make hunch that which file it may be since entire file system is encrypted (e.g., file names, folder names, contents of every file, free space, meta data, etc).

Let’s come to the point…how actually it encrypts/decrypts the data…does it save something into my hard disk? Well if you have porn movies that you don’t want your office admins to see make an EVD, put your .avi or .mpeg files there and be safe . You won’t be caught. Once you store it in EVD it will be completely encrypted and now that nobody is around you and you want to see the movie give your password and open the EVD. Now double click to open your video file. System will open media player to show your video. TrueCrypt decrypts and passes on video data chunks to RAM which is then played by media player.