[Cialug] encrypting a file

[Zachary Kotlarek]

On Apr 18, 2009, at 12:23 PM, kristau wrote:

> How about TrueCrypt?  You could create a very small TrueCrypt volume,
> mount that volume and copy your file into it.  Then unmount the
> volume, send that to your end-user and give them the encryption key
> via a different channel.  TrueCrypt is an easy install on Windows
> systems, and I believe it works OK on Vista 64-bit (but I've not
> tested that).


If you want to keep the files encrypted at the destination I think  
disk images are the only way to go -- it's much too complicated for a  
typical user to decrypt a file for use into RAM only, or to properly  
clean up the unencrypted copy from their disk.

This is one thing I think Apple's disk images really get right -- read/ 
write sparse images with optional encryption. That and the ability to  
represent entire disks (as opposed to single volumes) in a disk image.  
But Apple doesn't think we should have the specs for their disk image  
format, so it's only useful in OS X. TrueCrypt has support for sparse  
images but AFAIK it only works with NTFS, so it's Windows-only and  
requires standard pre-allocation for cross-platform use.

	Zach

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