Slashdot Mirror
Fast File Encryption for Windows?
cryptoz wonders: "I've used numerous encryption applications
for both Windows and Linux over the past few years and have always been satisfied. Until I realized I needed to start encrypting large files (say 10 to 30 GiB), or at least a large number of small(er) files. I found that everything I use seems to take hours and hours to compress, encrypt and shred. Not to mention decompressing, decrypting and deleting on the other end.
Every web search I do on the topic seems to turn up mostly closed-source applications or snake oil, neither of which is acceptable. Does Slashdot have any suggestions for fast file encryption? I should make it clear that in my particular case, I do not need to have a perfect key or incredibly secure encryption, since it is not the weakest link (as I am susceptible to hardware key-loggers, CRT eavesdropping and the like). The encryption needs to be just strong enough, but most importantly, *fast*." This is a worthwhile question, but when dealing with files in the 10s of GB, can anything really be considered to be "fast"?
I don't know if this is in the ballpark, but we Truecrypt on hard drive backups we take off site. It is open source which is nice. It allows you to mount a virtual hard drive that is either a file on an existing partition or as a sort of phantom partition that only TrueCrypt will see. It encrypts on the fly, hence it's usefulness to us. We just have a few usb hard drives. When we plug them in, we can mount them using a password or more elaborate means. It may be worth a peek.
http://www.truecrypt.org/
It's what I use and it's quite fast. I get about 52 MB/sec encryption speed and I'm loving it.