I bought a new pen drive, a Kingston DataTraveler, and noticed a great little tool I had installed on my old drive. The background to this nice little tool was when I had to store a couple of database backups on the drive and found it stupid not to encrypt the data and protect it with a password.
After some google browsing I came across TrueCrypt, from TrueCrypt Foundation. This tool really is the sh…
Background
A lot of people uses a USB pen drive storing the most personal stuff on it, such as banking IDs, CVs, and other personal things. Ask around among your colleagues and notice how many of them using encryption on their USB pen drives. You will be amazed…
Why?
Why use encryption on your USB pen drive? Well, they are pretty small, easy to be lost, you maybe lend it to somebody who is not authorized to read the files stored on the drive. Therefore it would be nice to have some tool to encrypt the drive or parts of it.
TrueCrypt
As mentioned above I came across TrueCrypt, using google. At first I couldn’t figure out how to use it, but all the pieces fell into place after some fiddling around with the tool.
The key features
- Create a virtual encrypted disk within a single file.
The size of the file is up to you to decide. - Encrypt an entire partition or storage device.
- Mount the virtual disk as it was a real disk.
- Supported encryption algorithms: AES256, Serpent, and Towfish.
- Supported OSs: Windows Vista/XP/2000, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)/10.5 (Leopard), OpenSuSE x86/x64 (64 bit) .rpm, Ubuntu x86/x64 (64 bit) .deb
- Installs in a regular fashion or only unpack somewhere, meaning that you can extract it directly onto your pen drive and run it from there.
Download
The latest version can be downloaded here. Right now the latest stable version is 6.0a.
Extra tools
Together with the TrueCrypt tool, you can use yet another little nice tool, TCExplorer, to be used directly on the encrypted virtual disk image file. Using this tool will let you read and write files off the virtual disk image without mounting it as a real disk. You maybe not have the rights to mount drives on your workstation or on a public PC. Be careful to look for files in the temporary files folder (pointed out in an .ini-file) before leaving.
My pen drive setup
I have setup my pen drive with TrueCrypt, using extracted only installation. The pen drive contains a virtual disk file, size 1 Gb (pen drive is 4 Gb in total), to be mounted with TrueCrypt. I have also TCExplorer on the pen drive in case of user rights issues on public PCs or other workstations than my own.
It works like a charm!!!