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Cross-Platform Encryption?
Dr. Sp0ng asks: "I'm sure a lot of Slashdot readers carry around USB keychain drives or other portable media. What cross-platform encryption solutions have you found for these? The ideal solution would be something which can create a true encrypted disk image in a file, along with Windows and OS X (and perhaps even Linux) standalone executables which can mount these without requiring you to install anything. Obviously something like GnuPG could be used, but it won't let you create an actual mountable filesystem. There are plenty of Windows solutions, and Mac OS X users can simply create an encrypted DMG, but are there any cross-platform solutions out there?"
Rotating Cleartext as shown to be the FUTURE by Dan Brown!!!
Oh what's that? Unrelated eh? Maybe next time
My UID is prime... is yours?
Althought windows only, Truecrypt looks really cool and can be a real lifesaver in conjunction with pendrives or even gmail.
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This is not exactly what you are looking for, but how about ...
A big ZIP file on the drive.
+ It is encrypted.
+ It is cross platform if the underlying File System is.
- The computer needs a ZIP file decrypter and a encrypter if you want read/write.
- It acts like a file system, but really isn't.
- Not the best encryption.
Altho Disk Utility on OS X can create encrypted disk images, it only has one encryption method which is AES-128.
(prove me wrong here, but i've search many times on google to see if other encryption methods were available)
I once created a 4 GB encrypted sparse disk image, but copying large files to it will always result in an inresponsive OS on my 867MHz G4.
Maybe a fixed sized image will work better, but what I really want is support for other encryption algorythms so the user can make the trade-off between speed and security/paranoid level. I for one would not mind encrypting a disk with Blowfish only.
On Windows I use TrueCrypt, I can't wait to see an OS X port of that (and other platforms ofcourse ;)
I've been thinking about doing a QEMU setup on a flash drive with an encrypted file system, and including QEMU executables for various OSs. You coul d then boot up the QEMU image, which could have networking support with Samba or something, and then access the files over the network.
I haven't actually tried this yet, and I'm not entirely convinced it's a good idea, but it's one suggestion. Has anyone else tried this? Any comments or suggestions?
He specifically asked for a cross-platform solutions and not a Windows-only solution.
A pretty much identical Ask Slashdot from two years ago: Multi-Platform Encrypted Disk Image Formats?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
FreeOTFE runs in Windows and is compatible with Linux losetup/dm-crypt volumes. The only Win/Mac cross encryption program I've found is ccrypt which is unfortunately just a simple file encryption program.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
You *have to* check out "Embedded" Damn Small Linux. ~50MB download, extract to your USB key, and run a full blown Linux distro in QEMU (Linux and Windows QEMU included).
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Bestcrypt from Jetico does what you want, and runs under Windows and Linux. It's not free. Well, the windows version isn't free. But it's one of the few solutions that will do what you need.
For that particular case:(which was in the article).
I feel uncomfortable using closed-source encryption tools. Encryption is complicated. It is easy to introduce weaknesses. You don't know if secret software has back doors.
Link to Jetico.
unzip will supposedly support it in 6.1 & zip in 3.1.
bcrypt and ccrypt. They're all you need. Windows, Linux, whatever. Open-source and very good ciphers.
See subject heading. Was it just to warn us?
One word: Java.
It runs on Linux, Windows, OSX.
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It is CrossCrypt.
However, it hangs for me while writing lots of files on the crypto disk from windows, and the author had not replied to emails about the problem.
I've wished for something similar in the past. One solution that occurred to me would be to create an encrypted loopback filesystem under Linux. For those not familiar with this scheme, it essentially encapsulates a filesystem in a regular file and [en|de]crypts it at the kernel level.
One potential way to access this from Windows would be using Namespace Extensions. I believe this is the way that "special folders" such as Control Panel and Scheduled Tasks are integrated into the Explorer. It would seem to be straightforward for someone knowledgable in the area to create a Namespace Extension that could mount an encrypted loopback filesystem created in Linux.
QEMU??? What good will that do? Seems like it will only lock you into a Linux only solution rather than a cross platform solution.
QEMU sounds great but the reality, like so many other open source projects, is far short. QEMU doesn't seem to be able to reliably run any OS other than Linux, as a guest.
Windows XP Pro won't work for most of the installs because of a conflict with QEMU and XP's licensing system. The workaround for this issue is to run in Safe Mode without networking. Yea, that's handy!
Netware, won't install because QEMU only supports the NE2000 driver but only on interrupt 9. But, Netware can't use interrupt 9 for the NE2000 driver so no network, which in the case of Netware means no install!
OSX? Yea, well it would work, except that we can't get the CD-ROM hardware detection to work so, like, it won't even install OSX. But you can run the PPC variant of Debian which is like the same as OSX and shit!
QEMU promises great stuff but, for practical purposes and for mainstream operating systems it blows chunks!!! As for it's ability to run Linux, that's great but, Xen and UML already has that covered. I don't need another broken emulator to run Linux.
Ditto. Truecrypt is great, and free.
Although free to use, it's free-ness in other respects is unclear. The code is available to read (technically "open source"), but the license is a complete mish-mash of components, reflecting all the different contributions to it over the years: http://www.truecrypt.org/license.php
In particular, it states: "This product may be freely copied and/or distributed, provided that it is not modified or repackaged" and then goes on to say that you *can* repackage it as long as you attribute about 12 different people ...
Is there not a *real* Free product which does this?
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
They currently work on a Linux version, which should be out soon. Now it's Windows-only.
"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within." - Albert Einstein
Sourceforge.net used to allow non-open projects & many are still up there. I suspect Truecrypt was added after that change.
I agree that it is probably free according to DFSG (the attribution complaints are invalid, as the original BSD license is free). The license is NOT GPL-compatible. It also isn't recognized by the OSI. It would be preferable and should be possible for them not to pick a persnickety license.
It also includes the ability to use hidden volumes. You use one password and the file opens up normally, if you use another you can access a hidden volume in the file. After creating a hidden volume you shouldn't modify the non-hidden volume contents as it could overwrite your hidden data, but there is no way to tell there's a hidden volume without guessing the second password.
I just carry a usb pen with my secrect/public keys, I have a really long password, 4096 bit key, and every file is ascii armor encoded