While listening to a TWiT podcast, I overheard Leo Laporte talking about an open source, disk encryption software that is available for Windows and Linux.
This is good news! Since it is open source, you can look at the code and see for yourself that no malicious software (or trojan), or even a backdoor is placed in it. This is in contrast to some commercial security software that were known to have backdoors built in them to serve some unknown purpose by the developers themselves.
This is how it works. Remember how a file archiving program (like tar) groups a set of files and stores them in a single compressed file of a given format? Or even yet, remember those disk compression programs (like Doublespace) that came around as Windows95 was being introduced in the market that claims to double your hard disk’s capacity? It’s just like that.
A disk encryption program prepares a file of a defined size and mounts it so that it appears to its owner as a filesystem (or a disk drive) on the computer. However, instead of making the size of the files smaller, the contents of the files are jumbled (encrypted) in such a way that they are unrecognizable from their original form. The files are encrypted as they are stored on the filesystem, and decrypted as they are read. On the fly.
This adds a level of security in such a way that the files stored in the encrpted volume is inaccessible in their raw form without the encryption program loaded. If someone breaks into your system, let’s say online, what the intruder would see is a very large file. Any way it may be read, the contents of the file cannot be identified.
Did I get your attention? By all means, visit their website!