Say hello to themobileme.net April 20, 2008
Posted by Rey in Uncategorized.Tags: moving, new blog url, new site, themobileme
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Hello folks, those of you who’ve been kind enough to drop by. I want to let you know I’ve just moved my blog over to a domain I got a while back but haven’t gotten the time to fix up until now.
My new blog url is http://themobileme.net.
This will spare you from having to type the extremely long url of this blog. Please expect that this “old” blog will become a lot less updated since I’ll be posting any updates over on the new site.
This isn’t goodbye. I’m not going to totally abandon this site. I might change the content and blog more about life who knows?
Be seeing you at themobileme.net!
Truecrypt: The Ultimate in Personal Data Security April 7, 2008
Posted by Rey in Advances, Encryption, Personal Computing, security.Tags: data encryption, data security, decryption, Encryption, file security, free data encryption, free file encryption, on the fly, open source, plausible deniability, security, truecrypt
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And it’s free too!
What I’m referring to is the Truecrypt disk encryption utility. I’ve been using it over a month now and it’s the simplest most convenient way to keep your data secure.
Truecrypt is on-the-fly disk encryption software using the most advanced encryption technology publicly available. One overkill feature of Truecrypt is it actually gives the option to chain ciphers to encrypt a volume. I mean come on folks AES is a strong cipher on its own. But the paranoid creators of this great piece of software provide an option to cascade ciphers (e.g. AES+Twofish, Serpent+AES, or AES+Twofish+Serpent). It’s been given a stamp of approval by no other than Steve Gibson, well-known in IT circles as a security guru who would use it “without hesitation”. Google him hehe. Truecrypt is also cross platform which means you can run it on Windows, Linux, or even MacOS.
What Truecrypt essentially does is create an encrypted volume to which you save your data. Once mounted, this volume would appear as a new drive letter and process “on the fly” data encryption/decryption to data going in or out of the volume. It can also encrypt an entire partition or entire device, which would come in handy if you wanted to encrypt for example your whole 2GB/4GB flash drive or SD/SDHC card. As long as you use a great password (20+ characters long with a mix of numbers and special characters) to protect the encrypted volume it would be inaccessible to anyone short of the NSA and mistook for a chunk of random data. I personally use a 6-letter password though which I’d say is pretty good enough. Come on I’m not exactly hiding information which if exposed would be a threat to national security here.
The Windows version of Truecrypt provides the option to create hidden volumes so a scan of your hard drive wouldn’t be able to detect it unless it was mounted which allows for plausible deniability. Let’s say the CIA were to storm your house looking for a Word document that would implicate you in a “world domination” master plan. You could easily dismiss their charges and say “What file? Never heard of it, never saw it. Do you see it?” and actually be believable.
The latest version of Truecrypt is 5.1a. For more information you can scoot over to the Truecrypt wiki or it’s home website to download and read up.
