HIDDEN VOLUMES

Another and perhaps far more useful feature is VeraCrypt’s ability to create a hidden volume. You can think of these as an encrypted volume within an encrypted volume. When creating a volume, the wizard asks you the type of volume you wish to create, and gives you the option to either create a standard volume or a hidden volume. For most situations where you just need to shield documents from prying eyes, you can opt for the first option, which we’ve already discussed.

A hidden volume gives you the added advantage of plausible deniability. In security parlance, this means that even after being forced to give out the password for a (decoy) encrypted volume, you can convincingly deny the existence of other encrypted volumes. Creating a hidden volume gives you this kind of safeguard. To create a hidden volume, select the ‘Hidden VeraCrypt Volume’ option when you create a new volume. The application will first create an outer volume and let you add non-sensitive data to it. It then calculates the maximum possible size you can allocate to the hidden volume. Although it should go without saying, ensure that the password for the inner hidden volume is different from that of the outer encrypted volume.

MOUNTING VOLUMES

You mount a hidden volume in almost the same way as a standard VeraCrypt volume. The only difference is that when you select the file, partition or device that is the outer volume, VeraCrypt mounts the hidden volume only if you specify its password. In other words, if you enter the password for the outer volume, that will be mounted, and if you enter the password for the inner volume, the hidden volume will be mounted.

Although not a drawback, one crucial aspect when working with hidden volumes is that, although you can read from the outer volume, writing to it might end up corrupting the hidden volume. If you wish to be able to write to the outer volume without risking any damage to the inner volume, you must check a special option when you enter the password for mounting the outer volume. Expand the ‘Option’ section and select ‘Protect hidden volume when mounting outer volume’.

ENCRYPTION ON STEROIDS

Encryption software makes use of ciphers to encrypt your data. A cipher