How does truecrypt work

Anyone can use TrueCrypt to encrypt files, partitions, or storage devices. TrueCrypt is often used for both personal and commercial applications due to its advanced security techniques.

For example, small business and corporations alike can use TrueCrypt in order to encrypt customer information. Individuals who download copyrighted as well as otherwise illegal materials to hide these files from law enforcement agencies can also use TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt is advantageous because it provides real time encryption without slowing down the CPU.

TrueCrypt also provides parallelization and pipelining to increase the access speed to encrypted files. The data stored on your hard drive is your own property, you are responsible for it's integrity. However in many computing environments, such as corporate networks and public kiosks data is considered the property of facilitating party.

For example, e-mail messages on a corporate e-mail server are legally considered the property of that company as are the documents and data stored on corporate file servers. I try to keep a very large separation between personal data and work-related data. Personal content of any kind does not belong on a corporate computer. At least ,that is what any IT or security officer would tell a user after data has been confiscated.

That idea may be a sensible approach, but given the amount of time a user is spending at work, the rule is far from practical. Personal data and professional data is bound to be mixed on a computer's hard drive at any given time. It is still your responsibility to protect and control your data, and truecrypt can assure that prospect. Portable computing environments add another variable to data security. Laptops are often stolen and portable USB flash-drives are misplaced and left behind.

TrueCrypt can be used to secure an entire flash-drive as well as contents on a laptop's hard drive. I have found numerous flash-drives in the labs around campus and even in some classrooms. All of these drives contained numerous items of personal data, but strangely not all of them had a file described how to contact the owner. Identity theft is a very common crime and can be easily facilitated by unsecured personal data found on lost or stolen devices. TrueCrypt must be installed by an account with administrative privileges, but it can be used by any user account on the computer.

The program downloads as a zipped folder archive. The Windows XP compressed folder utility can be used to extract the program to an uncompressed directory. The install cannot happen from within the compressed folder.

Double-click the setup executable TrueCrypt Setup to get started. The default options are smore than suitable for a first-time install. There is no reboot required at the end to finalize the installation. TrueCrypt is now installed, but it is not actually protecting anything yet. An encrypted volume must be created and configure to allow the storage of data that should be secured. Checking installation requirements Testing truecrypt Is your mouse connected directly to the computer where TrueCrypt is running?

If everything was OK, the following text will be displayed: Keyfile created. To create a new volume you have to consider its name and type. There are only two types of such volume: normal and hidden. What is the difference between them? The hidden is just that, hidden the placement is different - more info on TrueCrypt homepage. You create a volume named home. In case you have more than one key type another path, and if you have entered all the keypaths, leave empty and press [Enter] TrueCrypt will now collect random data.

Now the program will start to create your volume. The time needed for this operation depends on your CPU and the size of the volume. The script will let you know when it is complete Volume created. You can try to open it in a text processor, my congratulations if you manage to read anything from it.

This is required because TrueCrypt uses the Linux tool mount to mount a volume which needs to be passed a filesystem as an option. Now when you have created a filesystem on your volume and mapped it, you can mount it to any directory. But what should you do to encrypt an already existing directory? This is very simple. Just move data from this directory then mount volume to this directory and move the data back to this directory.

The size of volume should be a little bit larger than the size of the directory. As you will discover, after a reboot you will have to mount the volume again. There is a simple way to do it. Browsing a forum on TrueCrypt homepage I picked up on two different solutions:. I suggest you to use the second way which I describe below. There is one simple reason. In this case running boot scripts placed in init.

This way anyone could read your password. Save changes and leave the editor. The first thing you have to do is to automatically mount the USB drive at startup. At first you have to see where the pendrive is in the system. Stick the pendrive into the USB port and run the following command:. Add this line:. Next step is to move the key to the USB drive and change the line in your. Now the system mounts the virtual volume after the reboot automatically.