Encrypt Your Thumb Drive

Posted By: Sarah Perez | Feb 9th @ 4:57 AM

I was reading a great post on LifeHacker about TrueCryprt, a free, open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP/2000 and Linux. The software, which creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real hard disk, sounds pretty awesome on its own. However, a commenter, pmhesse, pointed out what is, in my opinion, the software's greatest feature - it doesn't need to be installed to work! As it turns out, you can just put the following files on your thumb drive: truecrypt.exe, truecrypt.sys, and the encrypted volume itself. The encryption is done automatically, in real-time, and transparently. TrueCrypt volumes are hidden and impossible to identify; until decrypted, a TrueCrypt volume appears to consist of nothing more than random data. This is great for anyone who needs to take sensitive files out of the office on a USB key (or just for privacy nuts in genera!)