Here's a scenario that is sadly all too common today. You're traveling on the road with your laptop, which suddenly is stolen. What do you do if you have a spreadsheet or database full of personal information on the hard drive? If you answer, "I don't worry. My drive has encryption on it," I'd be pretty surprised.
Unfortunately, many of us often think about the fact that we should be doing more to protect our data, but ultimately it doesn't occur. A lot of people I talk to who don't use encryption don't do so because it can be intimidating, complex to understand, and difficult to use. With TrueCrypt, you can easily create volumes on your hard drive and encrypt them to securely store your data.
What Can TrueCrypt Do for You?
The open-source project TrueCrypt is a great alternative to many of the costly disk encryption software programs on the market. Many people don't need their entire disk encrypted, but instead require only a small place to secure their data on their drives—a vault. TrueCrypt allows you to create a predefined amount of space, called a "volume," where you can safely stow away any personal data with the security options you choose during volume creation.
From a small 10M volume to an entire partition on your hard drive, your volumes will be protected by a password of your choice, or keys if you choose, and encryption algorithms such as AES-256, Blowfish, CAST5, Serpent, Triple DES, and Twofish. AES-256 is recognized by the NSA for safely securing classified information. You can find more information about the various methods of security used on the Encryptions Algorithms page of the documentation.
Downloads and Installations
Visit the downloads page to find packages for Windows XP, Fedora Linux 4 and 5, openSUSE 10, and Ubuntu 4 and 5. If you can't find the specific download for your OS, you can compile the source code available. You'll also need your specific kernel source code for your Linux installation. For information on compiling, make sure to follow the instructions in the Readme.txt file after unzipping TrueCrypt.
Since installations will vary, I won't detail instructions for doing so. The documentation provided will assist with installation on any operating system you plan to use. For machines that have root access denied to normal users, remember to accept allowing non-admin users to run TrueCrypt during the installation questions.
Creating Volumes
Once installation is complete, you can start creating volumes. The Linux version offers only a command-line interface, but it's very simple to use. Initiate a shell session and start by creating a mount point as root. TrueCrypt will use this point to mount the virtual file on in order to read and write data in and out on the fly.
I won't show you how to create a keyfile, which you will be asked to do during volume creation. My advice is to read the section of the docs on keyfiles before you decide to secure your volumes with them.
Next, create a small volume to experiment with. For my installation, the TrueCrypt binary was installed to /usr/bin/truecrypt. During installation, the script asks you where to install the actual program. Again, if you want to use it as a normal user, you'll have had to answer "yes" to allowing it run as a non-admin account. I'll assume creation and mounting of volumes as a normal user from here on out.
# truecrypt --create mydata.tc
This command starts a series of questions. You can safely select all of the default answers, but when asked, you should choose a volume size of 128M and type in a password to protect the volume. The password should be a fairly lengthy phrase to ensure security. If your system has a mouse connected, choose "yes" when asked and then randomly move your mouse around until enough random data is collected to encrypt the volume. If you don't have a mouse connected, you'll be asked to enter at least 320 random characters.
Once finished, take notice that TrueCrypt created what appears to be a 128M file in your home directory.
# -rw-rw-r-- 1 maxhetrick maxhetrick 128M Mar 11 21:53 mydata.tc
The volume looks and feels like a regular file; however, once mounted, it provides a space to read and write data to and from. Whether you store 1M or 120M of data on it, it will appear to be 128M all the time. Also, if someone were to attempt to look at the volume while it's unmounted without your password, they would see only random data.
Mounting and Unmounting Volumes
Now that you have a volume created to test, you'll need to mount the volume so you can access it:
# Enter password for '/home/maxhetrick/mydata.tc':
# mount
/dev/mapper/truecrypt0 on /mnt/tc type vfat (rw,uid=500,gid=501)
The -u option ensures that your normal user and group ID are mapped to the volume, which means you have permissions on the mounted volume. Now that you have the volume mounted, you can create, copy, move, edit, and delete anything you like, as you would on any directory. Go ahead and copy a file to the newly mounted volume:
# df -h
/dev/mapper/truecrypt0 128M 2.0K 128M 1% /mnt/tc
What I've done is copy over a small text file from my home directory to the mounted volume.
Now, run the df command to see that the system treats the mounted volume like any other mounted or mapped piece of media.
Once finished creating new files or moving existing files over to the encrypted volume, you can then unmount it:
The -d option dismounts and unmaps the mapped volume. If you don't specify the path to the mount directly, TrueCrypt will unmount and unmap all volumes it finds.
What I've shown you demonstrates the very simple form of volume creations with basic options.
Hidden Volumes
An interesting feature for the security paranoid is the option of creating hidden volumes within a normal volume. TrueCrypt refers to this as the commonly used term "plausible deniability." If someone were to use violence toward you to gain access to an encrypted share, you could theoretically hand over the outer volume password with fake data located on it. Since the hidden inner volume is actually the one used to store your information, the thief would never know a second volume exists. If you remember, the system shows it as a continuous-size file, not distinguishing free space from random data.
Encrypt Away!
As mentioned, the project also runs on Windows. The Windows version has both a command line interface and a very nice GUI for use. You can find many practical uses, such as using the Traveler Mode for encrypting USB flash drives. Be very careful with full partition encryption, though. Since TrueCrypt completely formats the area chosen, you could easily select a live partition, which could result in data loss.
With TrueCrypt packages available for many Linux versions and Windows, you now have no excuse to not encrypt data on your machines. It not only offers some very secure encryption and peace of mind for those on the road, but best of all, it's open source...which we all know I adore.
Max Hetrick is a PC Support Analyst/Specialist who holds a certification as an MCSA. He also has experience with installation and maintenance of Linux operating systems from the PC to server levels. Max can be reached at
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