Re: TrueCrypt mount without TrueCrypt ?

"Minh Van Le" <[email protected]> writes:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [email protected]
>> [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Daniel Pittman
>> Sent: Saturday, 20 March 2010 9:26 PM
>> To: [email protected]
>> Subject: Re: [chat] TrueCrypt mount without TrueCrypt ?
>> 
>> 
>> "Minh Van Le" <[email protected]> writes:
>> 
>> > Can a TrueCrypt volume be mounted on a PC that does not have TrueCrypt
>> > installed ?  I want an encrypted USB flash drive that has its own "auto
>> > extractor (or mount)" mechanism.
>> 
>> I don't know the answer to your question, I fear.  I am interested, though,
>> to understand what threat you are going to defend yourself against with
>> this arrangement?
>
> Physical theft of my USB stick.
>
> I would like to encrypt all data on the USB stick, and when I put it into a
> PC (usually with Windows or Linux) that I can double-click some DLL or
> executable on the USB stick that will then transparantly decrypt the file
> system contents.

Transparently like that will require installing an IFS driver, which is going
to need root (er, Administrator) access.  You might find it easier to find
some application that is like "WinZip for TrueCrypt", and provides user-space
only access to copy things back and forth.

As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist for TrueCrypt. :(


What does exist is FreeOTFE, including their "explorer" module:
http://www.freeotfe.org/

That works together with the LUKS system supported by dm-crypt, which I can
tell you does work and is stable.  It has some performance quirks that mostly
don't matter — and certainly not for use on a USB stick.

(This email, and all mine for quite some years, are written from a machine
 running on top of a dm-crypt LUKS partition; the stability and security suit
 me, though you want to pay attention to the encryption mode. :)

>> It seems to me that this, especially from a single vendor source, is an
>> invitation to lose your data almost immediately.
>
> Sure. But it's better than nothing.  TrueCrypt to my knowledge is fairly
> stable and reliable and won't corrupt your data.

*nod*  I have no argument with that, and it is certainly better than most
people are going to have.  In the "you only have to run faster than the
bear..." sense, it wins. :)

Anyway, it looks like TrueCrypt doesn't have what you need, but FreeOTFE and
LUKS/dm-crypt do — with the added bonus of being all open source and all.

        Daniel
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