(A step by step guide is available from the good people at S ecurity in a Box here.) GPG4USB will run on both Windows and Linux, in case any of you are still hanging on to Windows.Īnother favourite program of mine. This can be done from the command line but for novices I’d recommend reading the excellent guide for my favourite program GPG4USB which will allow you to encrypt and decrypt files with a few clicks of your mouse. While gpg is mainly known for allowing people to send each other e-mails safely it also can be used to encrypt files. Although this can be done manually, the installation DVDs for both Ubuntu and Linux Mint (arguably the most user friendly flavours of Linux for beginners), allow you to choose to encrypt your hard drive with a password during setup.
LUKS can also be used to encrypt your entire Hard Drive on a Linux Machine. For further reading please see the Cryptsetup FAQ If you do know what this means and/or would like another layer of security, I would suggest reading my post on using LUKS to create encrypted containers using the program ‘cryptsetup’ which allows you to choose different ciphers and key lengths. If you don’t know what this means then I would suggest sticking with these default options. N.B When you use Disk Utility to encrypt a stick in this way, in TAILS at least the default options are AES-XTS-Plain 256 Bit. This also makes up for the inconvenience of using a “Live” system like TAILS as usually any data in the system would be lost when you shut down the computer – this way you can safely save any files or links to the stick to preserve data between sessions. There is an excellent step by step guide on how do this in TAILS (a “live” operating system which I strongly recommend to keep your data private) and newcomers to Linux will be reassured that there’s no need to use the command line, making this option ideal.
Once you have set the password, the system will simply prompt you for it each time you plug it back in. LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) allows you to create encrypted containers for files as well as encrypting entire USB sticks with a password via a program called Disk Utility. If you want to be able to communicate securely with other people my best advice is to use Torchat which I will touch on in another post.
The alternatives I discuss here are mainly for information you want to protect within your home or business e.g financial records so aren’t particularly suitable for sending information across the internet. In the first instance it will be important to consider your threat model and what kind of information you want to keep safe.
There are a range of free and open source tools out there to help keep your information safe from prying eyes. Those of you who follow my blog will have seen my previous post detailing my reasons for phasing Truecrypt out when it comes to protecting my personal data and why I recommend you do the same.
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