Encrypting your USB drive

I have been looking for good encryption software for some time now. I am very particular about protecting my personal information especially so because I take my 2 GB USB memory stick with me all the time in my keychain. I have finally come across TrueCrypt, an open source disk encryption software that works for both Windows and Linux.

TrueCrypt offers many features such as virtual encrypted disks, hidden volumes and it is very simple to use. I downloaded it, extracted the files from the .zip archive, and then used TrueCrypt Format to create a standard TrueCrypt volume. I plugged in my USB flash drive and clicked on Select Device. I then proceeded to format my whole USB stick using all the default options. Once my USB flash drive was formatted with TrueCrypt, I used TrueCrypt to mount it as a regular drive and assigned it a drive letter. I copied all the files I wanted to carry around with me from the PC to the USB memory stick.

The nice thing about TrueCrypt is that you can do the same thing with a partition on your computer hard disk, or you can use TrueCrypt Format to create an encrypted partition using just a file. I also like the fact that I can use my encrypted USB flash drive on both my Linux and windows computers.

Geek you know that encryption will not protect your data if you are using a simple to guess password? Many tools out there can be used to guess passwords. Most such tools use dictionaries and word permutations (hello, h3ll0, he11o, hello2) to try and guess your passwords. Modern Pc’s can process about 1 million character/second; a brute force attack on an 8-character lower case word would take an average of 29 hours!

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