TrueCrypt - Opensource Encryption
Encryption is something we know we need, but keep putting it off due to a lack of know-how, or the perceived inconvenience associated. With the prevalence of laptops and ultra mobile PCs in the market, data have become more “mobile”, so too have data theft. Can you imagine the implications of your personal data being compromised? Can you do anything about it? You can with Truecrypt.
The application interface may seem intimidating with lots of options, but its actually pretty simple if you read the associated comment. We will be illustrating the example of encrypting a disk partition.
Installation
Download the application here. Its Open-Source and totally free for personal or commercial use. After you finish downloading, run the installer.
The installation process is pretty straight forward. All the default options should be fine, just note that select “Install” for the mode of installation. After finishing the installation process, fire up the program.
Encrypting your Partition
Startup the program and select “Create Volume”.
Select the option “Create a volume within a non-system partition”. If you read the other available options, its self explanatory and you can revisit these options once you’re more familiar with TrueCrypt.
Select the option “Standard TrueCrypt volume”.
At Volume Location, click “Select Device” and select the partition which you want to encrypt.
The next few steps are pretty straight forward. Read the comments and follow through, leaving the default options unless you know what you’re doing.
Before the final step, move your mouse randomly for a few seconds. Clicking the “Format” button will erase all the data on the partition and complete the process of creating your encrypted partition.
Accessing your Encrypted Partition
If you try to access the encrypted partition from “My Computer”, you will be presented with a message to format the drive. DO NOT FORMAT IT.
In order to access and use this partition, you have to mount it through the TrueCrypt program.
On the program interface, first select a drive letter which you want the encrypted volume to be mounted and click on “Select Device“ and select the partition which you have setup in the earlier step.
Input your password which you determined in the setup process previously.
Done correctly, you will now be able to access the encrypted volume which you created. (Z:) is the mounted encrypted volume, where (S:) was the original partition which you selected for encryption during the setup process, and is just a “Shell”.
Removing the Encrypted Volume
When you have finish working with the encrypted partition, it is important that you dismount / remove the encrypted volume to prevent data corruption / unauthorized access.
From the application interface, select “Dismount” or “Dismount All” before you shutdown or leave your work station. You will notice that the (Z:) is no longer accessible and (S:) is back to being a shell, prompting you to format the drive for usage. Just note any unsuspecting user who follows the prompt to format the drive will cause (S:) to be erased, and it will become a normal partition again. The TrueCrypt volume you created will also be erased along with all the data in the (Z:) previously.
Note: If you cannot afford to lose the data in your encrypted partition, you can experiment with creating a “file container” instead. The process is similar to the creation of an encrypted volume.
Additional Resources
There are many options in creating a encrypted and secure volume. It can be a file container, disk partition (as illustrated), thumbdrive, or even your entire hard disk with your Windows installation. This method will not allow access for the computer to even boot into windows, instead prompting you to input your password upon powering up. The steps are similar to what you just went through, listed below are resources to other modes of using TrueCrypt.
UPDATES 08/07/08 – TrueCrypt updates to version 6.0a
UPDATES 24/07/08 – An alternative, FreeOTFE which also provides a PDA version
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