Reading your comments gave me an idea of how to make my security question answers harder to guess, while still not being overly hard for me to remember.
Aww, not gonna share, even with a made-up example?
I'm not familiar with TrueCrypt. Does it let you encrypt individual files, or only whole disks? If its the latter, do you know of any programs to encrypt individual files or groups of files, that you would recommend?
TrueCrypt lets you make any size vault you want, from 1 meg to... well, I don't know if there's even an upper limit. I had a 9 gig vault once. I suppose I could encrypt my entire 2TB external drive if I wanted to.
TrueCrypt even has a way of putting a hidden vault inside of another vault, so if someone sees the non-hidden vault and forces the password out of you, they open up and there's some dummy files but no sign of the other vault. Because when you do the secret vault thing, you basically have two passwords for the same vault file. One gets you into the dummy vault, and the other gets you into the hidden vault. (Hidden vault has to be smaller, by necessity, than the vault it's hiding in.)
Best of all, TrueCrypt is open source, so it's completely free with no restrictions on its use.
And for extra security, get OpenOffice (if you don't already have it), another free program; a word processor that can save/read Word format and other formats. Save an OpenOffice file (.odt ending) with a password and nobody can read the file without the password. Stick the password-protected file in a TrueCrypt vault, and it's added security.
So it's entirely possible to stick such a password protected OpenOffice file inside a vault which is hidden in another vault.
Best part: you can disguise the vault files. Add different endings to them to disguise them. That 9 gig vault I had once was disguised as a movie file (AVI, I think). Of course, it won't function like an ordinary whatever file, which gives it away, but if you put the vault file disguised as an OpenOffice file in with a bunch of other OpenOffice files, it'll be harder for some baddy to find which one is the vault. Unless the size is ridiculous for the file type, which is why I disguised the 9 gig vault as a movie file; it was plausible that a video file could be that big. And even if it's opened as whatever file type and doesn't play, there's always the possibility your attacker might think it was a corrupted file and ignore it.
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chiming
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Date: 2011-08-27 05:55 am (UTC)From:Aww, not gonna share, even with a made-up example?
I'm not familiar with TrueCrypt. Does it let you encrypt individual files, or only whole disks? If its the latter, do you know of any programs to encrypt individual files or groups of files, that you would recommend?
TrueCrypt lets you make any size vault you want, from 1 meg to... well, I don't know if there's even an upper limit. I had a 9 gig vault once. I suppose I could encrypt my entire 2TB external drive if I wanted to.
TrueCrypt even has a way of putting a hidden vault inside of another vault, so if someone sees the non-hidden vault and forces the password out of you, they open up and there's some dummy files but no sign of the other vault. Because when you do the secret vault thing, you basically have two passwords for the same vault file. One gets you into the dummy vault, and the other gets you into the hidden vault. (Hidden vault has to be smaller, by necessity, than the vault it's hiding in.)
Best of all, TrueCrypt is open source, so it's completely free with no restrictions on its use.
And for extra security, get OpenOffice (if you don't already have it), another free program; a word processor that can save/read Word format and other formats. Save an OpenOffice file (.odt ending) with a password and nobody can read the file without the password. Stick the password-protected file in a TrueCrypt vault, and it's added security.
So it's entirely possible to stick such a password protected OpenOffice file inside a vault which is hidden in another vault.
Best part: you can disguise the vault files. Add different endings to them to disguise them. That 9 gig vault I had once was disguised as a movie file (AVI, I think). Of course, it won't function like an ordinary whatever file, which gives it away, but if you put the vault file disguised as an OpenOffice file in with a bunch of other OpenOffice files, it'll be harder for some baddy to find which one is the vault. Unless the size is ridiculous for the file type, which is why I disguised the 9 gig vault as a movie file; it was plausible that a video file could be that big. And even if it's opened as whatever file type and doesn't play, there's always the possibility your attacker might think it was a corrupted file and ignore it.