IGX

I lug around a lot of software install packages,reference documents and contact lists on various flash drives and external hard drives as part of my job, and it made me nervous to think of accidentally walking away from a PC and leaving one of those flash drives sticking in the front slot. Anything not locked down in Corrections and the Youth Center tends to disappear (and it's not the inmates doing it). Trucrypt was the answer to my worries about spilling confidential data to a bunch of people just smart enough to exploit it and just rough enough to want to.

This is a free, and open source, data encryption tool that lets you encrypt flash drives, partitions, entire hard drives or just a spot on your hard drive for data you don't want other people seeing. I was a little intimidated by it at first, since I didn't want to lock myself out of my own hard drive by accident or anything, but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty fool proof.

Essentially, once you install Trucrypt, you can designate a "container" with a file name while running it. It creates a password for the container using high powered encryption protocols (you can take your choice of several) and incorporates random mouse movements into the key as well. Then later, when you want to access files in the container (or move stuff into it, etc,) you start Trucrypt and "mount" the container to a drive letter, and the software encrypts and decrypts on the fly as you work, with no performance hit that I can see (at least on a fairly modern desktop). Don't forget or lose your original password, as even God Himself won't be able to decrypt the container (at least without a multi-petra-flop supercomputer and a lot of free time.)

Good stuff. ABW rates it two paws (dewclaws?) up.