Introduction to Encryption
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There are a number of ways to secure your system from prying eyes. One of the best involves using encryption. This article will introduce you to the reasons for using encryption, and to using TrueCrypt, an open source encryption system that offers excellent functionality, from encrypting files and folders to an entire hard drive and more.
One of the main reasons we protect our computers with anti-virus, anti-malware, and firewall software is to protect our data from being accessed by other computers and other people, regardless of their intent. We tend to store very sensitive data--such as banking or tax information--on our computers instead of the "cloud" simply because we want this information to remain private.
One way to keep this information private is to use built-in Windows user permissions, which can prevent other users from accessing your personal data. But, if our user account does not have a password, or we have written it on a Post-it note underneath the keyboard, the security provided by our account becomes meaningless.
Another way we can keep our data away from prying eyes is to store it on removable media like USB flash drives or external hard drives. The only problem with this method is we forfeit any security or privacy once the hard drive is no longer in our possession.
However, there exists an alternative method to keep our data safe and secure on a shared computer, an external hard drive, or even the "cloud." This method is called encryption, and it can protect anything from individual files to global communication systems. At its most basic level, encryption rearranges all the bytes that comprise data, and the only way to put the data back together again (known as decrypting) is to know how the data was originally encrypted to begin with. Many encryption schemes are protected with a password, and this password helps define the encryption scheme used to encrypt the data. The more complex the password, the stronger encryption will be.
You have probably used encryption many times without ever knowing it. Encryption is commonly used to protect wireless networks (WEP, WPA/WPA2), website communication (SSL/TLS), and mobile phone communication (CMEA). Encryption software can encrypt data several different ways; but, if you are unfamiliar with encryption, I will show you a simple example.
This method is called shifting. Let's pick a word: p o p c o r n. With shifting, the letters are incremented by one, so a becomes b, b becomes c, c becomes d, and so on. So, if we encrypt the word "popcorn" using the shift method, the result will be: q p q d p s o. This is as simple as encryption gets.
From this point on, the different encryption methods become more and more complex, making it harder for people to access the data protected by the encryption. There are hundreds of encryption programs available, many of them free of charge and some costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The encryption software we will be using is called TrueCrypt, which is free and open-source. What makes TrueCrypt so great is not only does it have the ability to encrypt individual files and folders; but, it can encrypt an entire hard drive! However, its complete functionality does not stop there. TrueCrypt also has the ability to encrypt an entire Windows operating system, including the potential to even create a hidden operating system.
We will talk more about this advanced functionality later. In this tutorial, we will focus on TrueCrypt's most basic feature: encrypting individual files and folders.
Next: Installing TrueCrypt >>
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