On-the-fly Encryption with TrueCrypt

 

How sensitive is your data? You may use highly confidential data at work or at home. If you are concerned about the potential exposure of that data, encryption may be a good solution for ensuring that your data remains protected. One tool that you can use to encrypt your data is TrueCrypt. It is a free, open source program that works on Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux.

TrueCrypt is a very easy-to-use tool. I installed it today on my Ubuntu laptop, and within about five minutes, I created an encrypted drive and put sample data in that drive. You can download the software at http://www.truecrypt.org/.

When you create an encrypted drive with TrueCrypt, you are creating a file on your file system that contains all of the encrypted data you will be protecting. Creating the encrypted drive is the trickiest part, but the on-line tutorial for beginners makes it very easy to use. If you are more experienced with encryption technologies, you may like that it offers a variety of algorithms, including my favorites – AES and SHA-256.

After you create your encrypted drive, the next step is to mount it. To do this, you select a drive letter (Windows) or a slot (Linux) to which to mount the drive. Next you select the encryption file you just created and mount it. You will be prompted for the password for the encrypted drive that you entered when you created it. If you enter the correct password, the drive mounts, and you can use it like any other drive or file system.

In Ubuntu, from the Settings / Preferences window, I chose to use automatically open the mounted drive in Explorer once it was mounted, so a normal file system window popped up and allowed me to use it like any other mounted partition. I was also able to find the mounted partition in /media/truecrypt1, which allowed me to use it from the command line as well.

From what I have seen, the Windows version has some added functionality for encrypting system partitions and even creating a hidden encrypted partition that can be used for creating a hidden operating system. This may be good if you are trying to cover your tracks, but from a security professional’s view, this may be hard to detect in a forensic investigation. Perhaps in a future post, I will try to find a hidden TrueCrypt system partition using FTK or Encase.

29 Окт 2012 , written by Администратор
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