USB Drive Encryption

[ScottW]

Anyone recommend any software that is both Mac & Windows compatiable that I could use to encrypt my flash-drive. I'd like to be able to de-crypt and access it without a huge hassle (installing a program on the host system). Something that ran on the USB drive that I could run. A folder inside the USB drive would be what is encrypted.

Any ideas?

[perfessor101]

Your cross platform compatibility requirement is the sticking point here. Your drive will have to be formatted FAT 32 on a PC so that both the Mac and PC can read and write to it. You will have to have two versions of the software, one for the Mac and another for the PC too because PC software will not run on a Mac and vice-versa. The only exception to this is Java applications and I don't know of any Java based encryption software.

The application that is most likely to meet your criteria and is the most widely used is PGP.

[ScottW]

Ah! I found what I needed. Kremlin words great! Looks like a neato application.

PGP is not an option, it requires a service to be running.

[scruffy]

Looks a little like snake oil to my suspicious mind - it claims to automatically encrypt things when you log off, and decrypt when you log on. So, where does it store the key? Probably in (obfuscated) plaintext somewhere...

[ScottW]

Actually, Kremlin is not snake oil. It appears to have a long history, around 8 or more years old and is highly recommended in the news groups. Looks like early on it might have had some issues and funny thing in 1997 someone accused it of being snake oil.

[Andrew Adamson]

I used to use PGP in Windows. I've recently started using GPG, which is an implementation of an earlier version of PGP (when it was not encumbered by patents) and is freely available under the GNU Public License. Clients are available for numerous platforms, so compatibility is not a huge issue. The Mac version can be found at http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/. It uses public-key encryption, but also can be used for plain-old passphrase encryption (using the --symmetric or -c switch). The code is relatively compact and I don't think you need to run any services to support it. It is about as trustworthy as you could want nowadays. I use it from the command prompt, but I am sure there are front-end GUIs to make your life a little easier. I'm not sure if you can use it to encrypt a whole filesystem, but it should be relatively easy to write a zip-to-gpg script and a gpg-to-zip script to undo it.