@OmSigDAVID,
Quote:I know very little about computer software.
Well the price is right for software that can protect your privacy even from the Federal government IE free and the first thing I do with any new computer is to encrypted the whole hard drive using truecrypt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truecrypt
TrueCrypt From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Truecrypt)
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TrueCrypt on Windows
Developer(s) TrueCrypt Foundation
Stable release 7.1a / February 7, 2012; 21 days ago (2012-02-07)
Written in C, C++, Assembly
Operating system Cross-platform - Windows, Mac OS, Linux, DragonFly BSD [1] using the tcplay implementation
Available in 30 languages
(although most are incomplete translations)
Type Disk encryption software
License freeware / Source available[2]
Website
www.truecrypt.org
TrueCrypt is a free software application used for on-the-fly encryption (OTFE). It can create a virtual encrypted disk within a file or encrypt a partition or (under Microsoft Windows except Windows 2000) the entire storage device (pre-boot authentication).
Contents [hide]
1 Operating systems
2 Cryptographic algorithms
2.1 Modes of operation
3 Performance
4 Security concerns
4.1 Plausible deniability
4.2 Identifying TrueCrypt volumes
4.3 Passwords stored in memory
4.4 Physical security
4.5 Malware
4.6 The "Stoned" bootkit
5 Operation Satyagraha
6 Licensing
7 Trademarks
8 Planned features
9 TrueCrypt and the Trusted Platform Module
10 Version history
11 See also
12 References and notes
13 External links
[edit] Operating systemsTrueCrypt supports Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Linux operating systems[3] (using FUSE). Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of these operating systems are supported, except for Windows IA-64 (not supported) and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (runs as a 32-bit process).[3] The version for Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP can encrypt the boot partition or entire boot drive.[4] There is an independent, compatible[citation needed] implementation, tcplay, for DragonFly BSD [1] and Linux [5] [6].
[edit] Cryptographic algorithmsIndividual algorithms supported by TrueCrypt are AES, Serpent, and Twofish. Additionally, five different combinations of cascaded algorithms are available: AES-Twofish, AES-Twofish-Serpent, Serpent-AES, Serpent-Twofish-AES and Twofish-Serpent. The cryptographic hash functions used by TrueCrypt are RIPEMD-160, SHA-512, and Whirlpool.
[edit] Modes of operationTrueCrypt currently uses the XTS mode of operation. Prior to this, TrueCrypt used LRW mode in versions 4.1 through 4.3a, and CBC mode in versions 4.0 and earlier.[7] XTS mode is thought to be more secure than LRW mode, which in turn is more secure than CBC mode.[8]
Although new volumes can only be created in XTS mode, TrueCrypt is backward compatible with older volumes using LRW mode and CBC mode.[7] Later versions produce a security warning when mounting CBC mode volumes and recommend that they be replaced with new volumes in XTS mode.
[edit] PerformanceTrueCrypt supports parallelized[9] encryption for multi-core systems and, under Microsoft Windows, pipelined read/write operations (a form of asynchronous processing)[10] to reduce the performance hit of encryption and decryption. On some Intel processors, TrueCrypt supports hardware-accelerated AES to further improve performance.[11] The performance impact of disk encryption is especially noticeable on operations which would normally use Direct Memory Access (DMA), as all data must pass through the CPU for decryption, rather than being copied directly from disk to RAM.
In a test carried out by Tom's Hardware, although TrueCrypt is slower compared to an unencrypted disk, the overhead of real-time encryption was found to be similar regardless of whether mid-range or state-of-the-art hardware is in use, and this impact was "quite acceptable".[12] In another article the performance cost was found to be unnoticeable when working with "popular desktop applications in a reasonable manner", but it was noted that "power users will complain".[13]
[edit] Security concerns