Privacy and security concerns have always been a part of the tech world. Over time I looked into various methods of encryption and never found any that appealed. Eventually I ran across TrueCrypt which offered several methods of securing data and it seemed like a good candidate to investigate, but I admit at the time I was distracted with other things in life and put the whole idea of securing personal data on the back burner.
Lately all the attacks on computers connected to the net and personal info being stolen off computers or portable drives has brought security/privacy concerns back into focus for me. Once again looking back into the topic, I read a lot of good things about TrueCrypt and all the features offered along with cross platform accessibility made it very appealing. So I decided to try it out.
I haven’t had time to do a lot with it yet but I did a simple test run on a windows box and it performed perfectly! On a usb drive I created an encrypted volume with the client, taking only moments and the options displayed along the process made it a no-brainer. The volume was mounted as a drive using the TrueCrypt software and presto! The virtual drive was easy to read/write – storing whatever I choose. The next step is to dismount the virtual drive, once done the thumb drive shows an unreadable file of an unspecified type. Everything is secure until you decide to access it again with the TrueCrypt software and pass phrase you created, very nice!
Now for the best part, I took that file and was able to access it on my PC-BSD box. It was pretty painless, I created a directory to mount the volume to and opened a terminal. I changed to root, and mounted the file at the command prompt;
# truecrypt /path/to/encrypted/file /path/to/mounting/directory
I was asked for the password, then a keyfile which in my case was there wasn’t one so I just hit enter, and finally it queried about a hidden volume which I did not create so the default answer of NO was chosen, all done. Simple, now my secure volume was accessible from BSD to do whatever I wanted with. Dismounting and re-encrypting was even easier;
# truecrypt -d
Done! I do wish there was a pretty gui for it in BSD like there is in the windows version but all the 3rd party graphical front ends I found were out of date and did not work properly. No big deal, for my little test case the commands were very easy. There are a lot more options and abilities built into TrueCrypt, but for now I just wanted to keep it simple to see how it all went. I have to say TrueCrypt definitely earned a thumbs up from me.
There is no perfect way to secure anything especially data, however if my secure container ends up misplaced or stolen this should go a long way towards helping honest people stay honest. For those who are less honest or who are just a busybody sticking a nose where it doesn’t belong it should frustrate the crap out of them!
I almost forgot to mention, TrueCrypt is free!
TrueCrypt PBI installer for for PC-BSD here – [LINK]
TrueCrypt home page here – [LINK]
NEWS ALERT! The powers that be in Washington D.C. are doing their best to destroy the last vestiges of Free Speech online under the false pretenses of preventing stolen intellectual property.
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