The Gold Standard for free encryption is dead….or is it?

It’s a massive disappointment that the original developers appear to have pulled the plug, and are no longer going to develop Truecrypt.

Now come the blogs suggesting that Truecrypt is ‘insecure’ – even only days after the developers announcement.

Where did they get that idea from? Well, it was the original developers themselves, putting out the message on their web page – but is it true? Truecrypt, insecure?

Truecrypt – virtually the only free encryption tool of note, has been very high profile since it’s creation. As such, it has sustained 10 years of abuse and punishment at the hands of those who would see it ‘cracked’.

The truth is they haven’t managed to crack Truecrypt.

Yep, that’s correct.

Every single cracking effort, that has seen any tiny margin of success, could also be applied to every other similar encryption product.

100% Security is a myth.

Why? Simple:

No one tries to crack encryption algorithms any more.

It’s simply too hard. While we wait for quantum computing to change this fact, your biggest security threat is, and has always been, you.

‘Cracking’ encryption has become a game for enthusiasts – in reality, there are much  easier ways to gain access to encrypted data – which is beyond the scope of this blog. However, one simple example to mull over, is that while you are accessing the data, it is unencrypted…

Free Alternatives

I have had very good experiences with DiskCryptor (though it doesn’t support Win8 at the moment), for full disk encryption.

To encrypt files and folders, Axcrypt used to be very good, though I’m not impressed with their decision to include an OpenCandy installer (opt out)…..in a security product!

However, I’m not about to drop TC just yet – especially as it may become fully open source – which would be awesome.