It is amazing how much (sensitive) information we can now carry around every day. I have 8 gigs of all sorts of interesting stuff on a flash drive on my key ring, and hundreds of gigs on my laptop. Keeping that data out of the hands of evildoers should I lose my keys or have my laptop stolen is really important to me.
That’s why TrueCrypt is one of my favorite open source software products – it provides full disk encryption for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems at an unbeatable price point (free). One of its nice features is that you can create a fully encrypted flash drive (or hard drive) on, say, a Windows system and then take that device and use it on a Mac or Linux system with TrueCrypt installed – quite handy for those of us who use different operating systems on a regular basis. For the most paranoid amongst us, you can even set up hidden encrypted volumes within encrypted volumes to further shield your data from prying eyes. Version 7 of this vital part of my personal information security toolkit was released back in July, and adds the ability to have volumes automount when they are connected to the computer as well as protection of crash dump and hibernation files on Windows 7 systems. If you haven’t had a chance to play with TrueCrypt, give it a try today!
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