Let’s face it — these days it’s almost a certainty that some information on your computer is not for public consumption. Be it your accounting data on a personal machine or valuable trade secrets on a corporate machine, for better or worse, computers are part of our daily lives. In many cases, the theft of that data could have serious repercussions. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that a greater and greater percentage of computers sold are laptops. Losing a laptop now has the potential to make national news and could even result in a costly lawsuit.
With this information in mind, it makes more and more sense to utilize some level of disk encryption on your machine. TrueCrypt is a software system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted volume. On-the-fly encryption means that data is automatically encrypted or decrypted right before it is loaded or saved, without any user intervention. No data stored on an encrypted volume can be read without using the correct password/keyfile(s) or correct encryption keys. All encryption is automatic, real-time and transparent. Available from here, TrueCrypt is available under the TrueCrypt Collective License and works with Linux, OS X and Windows. It can use AES, Serpent and Twofish as encryption algorithms and supports RIPEMD-160, SHA-512 and Whirlpool hashing. When used in “traveler” mode, it does not even have to be installed on the machine on which it is run.
The TrueCrypt download section contains binary packages for some popular Linux distributions. If your…
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