Security software?

[ffutures]

While I was at Orbital over the weekend I managed to lose my USB memory stick - fortunately it's been found, and should be back with me in a few days, but it prompted me to think about security issues. This time there aren't any serious problems, but in the future there might.

Basically, I want to give at least part of the drive some sort of password-only access; the snag is that it needs to be something that will work with Windows XP and Mac OS-X, and possibly Linux if I end up going that route. The software that came with the drive works for XP only, which isn't much help.

I don't need it to be totally uncrackable - I'm not worried about business rivals or spies reading the drive, more about e.g. someone seeing a draft letter that mentions them, or something of that sort.

Is there any simple way of doing this?

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Not short of using a hardware-based encryption system, like the Corsair Flash Padlock which has a PIN keypad on the stick.

(Actually, I'm not sure if something cross-platform like TruCrypt couldn't be used as well, but I've not seen anyone do that...)

Edit: and there's also the other extreme, dropping the stick completely and using cloud-based solutions like Google Docs.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Google Docs has file size limitations which would be OK for letters etc. but sod-all use for e.g. the current work in process. I really don't want to spend a lot of money on a flash drive, my record for losing them / breaking them / putting them through the washing machine isn't good, think I'm on number five or six.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Probably worth looking to see if there are portable versions of TruCrypt then...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks - I'll take a look.

[cobrabay.livejournal.com]

It's actually Truecrypt not Trucrypt, see http://www.truecrypt.org/
I've used it on Windows & Linux, and there's a Mac OS X version too. You can supposedly create a Truecrypt container on a USB flash key. It's one of those things I keep meaning to do but never get around to. The downside of using it as a portable application (as opposed to using it on one of your own machines) is that you need administrator privileges to use it on a Windows box. It also might be an over the top solution, it's really meant to be a disk encryption system. You might be better off using a simple command line file encryption utility such as ccrypt (http://ccrypt.sourceforge.net/) that'll run on just about anything I think.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Nuts, I don't have admin privileges at work. I'll take a look at ccrypt, but given the minimal level of protection I need using Office's encryption is probably enough.