Encryption tools

It’s not paranoia but prudence that makes Mayank Sharma encrypt all his data. Twice. In a hermetically sealed room. While wearing a tin-foil hat.

There was a time when keeping your data under a username and password was considered ample protection. The computational overhead and the cumbersome programs relegated encryption into the realm of the paranoid. However, news of large-scale data snooping and overarching surveillance have reinvigorated interest in personal privacy. These days, basic file permissions and user accounts aren’t enough to deter a determined intruder.

The only pragmatic approach to keep your personal data to yourself is to encrypt it. Working with encrypted data is an involved process, but it’ll go a long way towards reinforcing your security and insulating your data from unwanted attention. There are a couple of strategies you can take for encryption. Most of the leading distributions now enable you to encrypt your entire disk while you’re setting them up.

Then there are programs that will help you create encrypted silos within your filesystem. The hallmark of these applications is that they can do on-thefly encryption. This means they’ll automatically encrypt your data before writing it to the disk and decrypt it when called for, assuming you have the right credentials. In this Roundup we’ll look at some of the programs that assist with this kind of transparent encryption and can easily slot themselves into your daily interactions with any kind of data.