![]() Micah quotes me:Ĭonsidering Schneier has been outspoken for decades about the importance of open source cryptography, I asked if he recommends that other people use BestCrypt, even though it’s proprietary. Lately, I am liking an obscure program called BestCrypt, by a Finnish company called Jetico. Micah also nicely explains how TrueCrypt is becoming antiquated, and not keeping up with Microsoft’s file system changes. Whatever you choose, if trusting a proprietary operating system not to be malicious doesn’t fit your threat model, maybe it’s time to switch to Linux. If it ever turns out that Microsoft is willing to include a backdoor in a major feature of Windows, then we have much bigger problems than the choice of disk encryption software anyway. And I agree with his ultimate conclusion:īased on what I know about BitLocker, I think it’s perfectly fine for average Windows users to rely on, which is especially convenient considering it comes with many PCs. Microsoft told him they removed the Elephant Diffuser for performance reasons. Last week, he published more research and explanation about the trade-offs. The Intercept’s Micah Lee recently recommended BitLocker and got a lot of pushback from the security community. ( Here I am in March speculating about an NSA back door in BitLocker.) Specifically, Microsoft made a bunch of changes in BitLocker for Windows 8, including removing something Niels designed called the “ Elephant Diffuser.” ( Here’s Niels’s statement from 2006 on back doors.) It was a snap decision much had changed since 2006. But it was designed by my colleague and friend Niels Ferguson, whom I trust. I choose TrueCrypt as the least bad of all the options.īut soon after that, despite the public audit of TrueCrypt, I bailed for BitLocker.īitLocker is Microsoft’s native file encryption program. ![]() I stuck with the program for a while, saying:įor Windows, the options are basically BitLocker, Symantec’s PGP Disk, and TrueCrypt. But the anonymous developers weirdly abdicated in 2014 when Microsoft released Windows 8. But big companies are always suspect, because there are a lot of ways for governments to manipulate them. I even used it after Symantec bought the company. I used it because I knew and trusted the designers. I still use Windows-yes, I know, don’t even start-and have intimate experience with this issue. ![]() Encrypting your Windows hard drives is trivially easy choosing which program to use is annoyingly difficult. ![]()
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