Protect Your Private Data

I was asking myself, "What will happen if my laptop is stolen?". I usually store private data both on my work and home laptops. So I was in the market for a solution to protect my private data.

I know that most operating systems have the ability to encrypt entire drives, but what I wanted was a cross platform solution, which would allow me to access the same data from different computers with different operating systems. I would also like to easily backup my encrypted data, either on an external drive or a cloud environment.

TrueCrypt, an open source and free project, gives me all the features that I want. I was really surprised at how mature the product is. I have successfully and easily used it on my Windows 7 work laptop, Ubuntu 11.10 home laptop and Mac Os X desktop at home. There's not yet a mobile version (Android, IOS etc), but it sure would be a welcome product.

Main Features as described on the TrueCrypt official website:

• Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.
• Encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive.
• Encrypts a partition or drive where Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication).
• Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.
• Parallelization and pipelining allow data to be read and written as fast as if the drive was not encrypted.
• Encryption can be hardware-accelerated on modern processors.
• Provides plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password:
• Hidden volume (steganography) and hidden operating system.

It's website is http://www.truecrypt.org/. Don't be fooled with the not so professional website. The tool itself is fantastic and easily accomplishes the task.