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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?"
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 ;)
Well, you could XOR your data, or have the disk in EXT2 format (with a small FAT32 partition at the start with EXT2 drivers for various sysems.
As for encryption, I presume you're interested in keeping the average user from sector L out of your files, should your key be "misplaced".
I'd look at GPG; it's roughly PGP compatible. There are the pay for versions of PGP for Windows that can create a big encrypted file and give it a drive letter. Maybe there exists some GPG code that can mount those files?
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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!
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?
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.
That, and I haven't seen a non-trivial Java business application yet that doesn't require a very specific JVM under a very specific OS (Windows) and a very specific browser (MSIE). So it's not cross platform, and incurs the p-code performance hit. A real winner.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
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
Well, then you need to tell IBM, Perceptive Vision, the contractor for our state government, and probably a bunch of other people how to do it. And if it takes as much effort to achieve portability as with C++, then what good is it, given the performance hit?
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
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.
That's what I was getting at, really ... the license just sounds too complicated :-)
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
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