What encryption software do you recommend? Hi, everyone.
Leo Noten, boom here for Askleo.com.
I was asked recently what encryption software I use and recommend.
The answer, as it turns can use would
turns out is ever so slightly complicated, although it is pretty clear.
The issue is that encryption software isn't really a thing.
What it is is there are different
encryption tools that you apply to different jobs.
Depending on what it is you're doing, you might use a different tool to actually
perform the encryption that we're talking about.
What I want to run through here are
the scenarios that I address personally, the tools that I use,
and then also a couple of tools I keep on deck for scenarios that I don't use
today, I have used in the past, and I want to be available to me in the future.
First one is whole disk encryption.
Personally, because I am primarily
a Windows person these days, on my laptop especially, I use BitLocker.
I use BitLocker to do whole disk encryption on that drive
so that while I'm traveling, if the laptop gets stolen, then hackers can't get in.
Whoever has the laptop can't get in.
There are other solutions, but that's the one I tend to recommend these days.
Make sure, of course,
that you back up your recovery key if you're using BitLocker.
Bitlocker for your internal hard drive is
great, especially, like I said, in laptops.
And there are, of course,
scenarios where you can use BitLocker to encrypt external hard drives or thumb
drives if you're going to exchange them with other Windows machines.
For the cloud, we've talked a lot about
using the cloud and how I believe it's a very powerful
tool, but you need to be careful with the data that you put in the cloud.
You need to make sure that anything that's sensitive is encrypted.
I now use Cryptomator to encrypt
anything sensitive that ends up going in the cloud.
The scenario is simply this.
I've got a sensitive document, say a tax return, right?
I want to save that and I want to save
that and replicate it across my various machines.
If I use Cryptomator,
the only thing that ever gets stored in the cloud is the encrypted file.
Nobody can get at that file without my master password for Cryptomator.
But I can access those files
easily on any machine that I happen to be using because I've got Cryptomator
installed and I've mounted the drive with my master password.
So if you are storing data in the cloud and you want to make sure that that data
is secure and accessible to anybody but those who are actually
authorized, consider using a tool like later to do that.
Now, if I just want to encrypt a file
or maybe a collection of files and send it to somebody or save it somewhere,
some of my backups are done this way, then I'll just use 7Zip.
Basically, current zip tools actually do a very good job of encryption
if you supply a password when you create the zip.
Like I said, it's one of the ways that I back up some of the things on my system.
Great example is that I've got all of these files in crypto, but I
back up the unencrypted versions, but I store them safely.
I do that by taking those unencrypted versions of all those files,
bundling them all up into a zip file with a password.
So again, they are encrypted
wherever they're stored, but I know how to get at them.
And it's a different encryption technology.
So if I ever have problems with one
technology, I've got the other one backing me up.
Zip files are great for this.
I strongly recommend you consider that especially for single or few file or
just a folder type of encryption and data transfer.
Now, there is one
small got you with zip files is that when you encrypt a collection of files or even
one file, the file names are not encrypted.
You'll be able to see that I've got, I don't know, Leo's 2022 1040.pdf.
You'll see that that's in the zip file.
You can't access the file because it's
encrypted, but you'll see that it's in there.
The solution to that,
if that is even an issue for you, because it's not an issue for everybody,
but if that's an issue for you, zip the zip file.
In other words, zip all of the files that you want to be encrypted.
It doesn't have to have a password at that point.
It's just a collection of files.
Then zip the zip file with a password.
That way, everything in that zip file, including the file names,
will be encrypted and the file names won't be visible.
All the person who has your encrypted zip
file in their hands will see is that it contains another zip file.
Encrypted email.
Gosh, that remains such a mess.
It really does.
I wish there were better solutions for this.
There are no great solutions for this.
The solutions that I tend to gravitate
towards if I need to send encrypted email is this.
I will create a document,
zip it with a password, and then send it as an attachment.
Again, the contents of that document are protected by encryption
and you're just using email as a way to get it from one place to another.
The other scenario that I use is Protonmail.
I have a Protonmail account and proton
mail is basically built on encryption, really good encryption as it turns out.
If you're emailing another Protonmail user directly, your email is encrypted.
It's a checkbox. It works both sides.
You're great. Basically, you're done.
It's like it's the way we would have wanted encryption to work planet wide.
It's all within the Protonmail ecosystem.
If you need to send an encrypted message to someone who's not a Protonmail
user, what happens is they do not actually get sent the message.
They get sent a link to the message.
That link takes them to the Protonmail
server where they need to provide a password that you'll have used to encrypt
your message in order to view your message.
So all the encryption remains local to Protonmail.
You're not technically sending the message in email.
You're sending a link to the message, and then your recipient can view
the message that way as long as they have the correct password that presumably
you'll have given them via some other mechanism.
Now, I mentioned I've got a couple of tools on deck.
Vericrypt is something that I have available to me.
I used it, and it's predecessor to TrueCrypt, for a very long time.
It's a great solution if you want to do
whole disk encryption that is platform independent.
If you want to take something from
Windows to Mac or to Linux or whatever, VueC rypt is cross platform.
It's a great way to basically have an encrypted something on your
external drive or your flash drive that, again, you can use pretty much anywhere.
I don't currently need something like
that, but if I did, that's the tool that I wouldn't end up grabbing for.
The other tool that I have available
to me, and it is, I'll just call it extremely geeky, is PGP GPG.
Gnu Privacy Guard, also known as Pretty Good Privacy.
Gpg is the open source version of PGP, which is closed.
The bottom line is that this is public key encryption for anyone.
As soon as we start talking about public
key encryption, things get really complicated really quick.
But these are the canonical tools to use for that a thing.
If you want to encrypt something,
for example, that only I can see, you would use my public key to encrypt it,
and then only I with my private key could decrypt it.
That's the scenario.
Public key encryption is basically the basis for the Internet.
It's fundamentally how
security on the Internet works, and GPG is how it is available
at an individual or in some cases organizational level.
I don't use it right now.
I used to use it to encrypt my backups. I don't anymore.
I've fallen back to using zip files to make it easier for others who might
need to in the case of something happening to me.
But GPG is available if I needed to encrypt something
to someone else using GPG, or if they sent me an encrypted,
a GPG encrypted file, I would be able to decrypt it using my private key.
But those are the kinds of things that are, like I said, on deck.
They're not currently in daily use, but they're available to me.
The bottom line when it comes
to encryption is to just use the right tool for the job.
If you're encrypting whole disks,
that's a different tool than just sending a file to somebody else,
which is a different tool than using encrypted email.
Each of them requires the right tool for the job.
The good news is that there are right tools out there.
There are really good tools to make this
stuff happen, and I strongly suggest that you make use of them.
Hopefully, this helps clarify
what I'm doing and what encryption tools are out there.
For updates, for comments,
for links related to this topic and more, visit
Askleo.com/153389.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.