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VeraCrypt Is the New TrueCrypt -- and It's Better

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-that-anybody-cares-about-your-tax-returns-and-old-school-papers dept.

New submitter poseur writes: If you're looking for an alternative to TrueCrypt, you could do worse than VeraCrypt, which adds iterations and corrects weaknesses in TrueCrypt's API, drivers and parameter checking. According to the article, "In technical terms, when a system partition is encrypted, TrueCrypt uses PBKDF2-RIPEMD160 with 1,000 iterations. For standard containers and other (i.e. non system) partitions, TrueCrypt uses at most 2,000 iterations. What Idrassi did was beef up the transformation process. VeraCrypt uses 327,661 iterations of the PBKDF2-RIPEMD160 algorithm for system partitions, and for standard containers and other partitions it uses 655,331 iterations of RIPEMD160 and 500,000 iterations of SHA-2 and Whirlpool, he said. While this makes VeraCrypt slightly slower at opening encrypted partitions, it makes the software a minimum of 10 and a maximum of about 300 times harder to brute force."

7 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Brute force by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Brute force via software? No, no. You're going about it wrong. You need to apply brute force to the operator.

    1. Re:Brute force by magarity · · Score: 5, Funny

      You need to apply brute force to the operator

      That's why my password is "I'll never tell!"

    2. Re:Brute force by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Shit. Someone just hacked my /. account. Please give it back?

  2. Oblig xkcd by PPH · · Score: 5, Funny

    http://xkcd.com/538/

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  3. Re:Wow, that's a lot of iterations by exploder · · Score: 4, Funny

    Wow, going from 2000 to 327,661 iterations sounds like a big deal. Does that actually add any value, or is that like doing rot-13 a million times?

    Any idiot knows you have to do it a million and one times.

    --
    Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
  4. Just goto the codeplex site and verify the commits by BrookHarty · · Score: 4, Funny

    Just goto the codeplex site and verify the commits this time!

    commits/date/comment

    2cf9790438f8 by Mounir IDRASSI (40 downloads) Oct 6 1:20 PM
    Windows vulnerability fix : finally make bootloader decompressor more robust and secure by adding multiple checks and validation code. This solves the issue found by the Open Crypt Audit project. Note that we had to switch to the slow implementation of the function decode in order to keep the size of the decompressor code under 2K.

    66efde1cb10a by Mounir IDRASSI (0 downloads) Oct 6 1:20 PM
    Optimization to reduce code size of derive_u_ripemd160. Useful for boatloader.

    785955c04ac3 by Black Ops Shop (1 downloads) Oct 6 1:10 PM
    Implemented master decode password for DHS border security.

  5. I did the same! by JoSch1337 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Instead of 1000 iterations of ROT13 I applied 655,331 iterations and I already feel much safer!!