Encrypted Virtual Drives: Yesterday's Technology Today

Many years ago, when I spent a lot of time clicking on buttons on websites that said "I am 18, Let Me In" when I totally wasn't, I began to develop an interest in encrypted virtual drives. At the time, the world was using Windows 95 for everything, and Windows 95 couldn't encrypt things into Pig Latin, let alone DES or Triple-DES, without some sort of magical incantation or software written by Phil Zimmerman. A virtual drive is simply a single file on your machine that you can read from and write to just as though it were a tiny hard drive. The logistics of telling your operating system that you have a file that it should treat just like a drive vary from OS to OS, but they all involve some sort of mojo that is not undertaken lightly.

Keep in mind that if you clicked on the "A:" drive icon in Windows 95, it would bitch and moan and throw an error that could, under some circumstances, crash your machine. Windows 95 was not "robust", and the only time I've ever seen Windows 9x run a virtual drive reliably was the 512MB BeOS R5 "test drive" installation option.

Then I found Linux, and from there quickly moved on to a little OS called "OpenBSD" that can essentially encrypt anything you'd care to throw at it. Encrypting a virtual drive under OpenBSD involved some strange commands I don't rightly recall, though I'm sure there's a few webpages out there that detail the process. You would essentially create the file with "dd", format it, and then attach a password to it somehow that you would have to enter every time you mounted it.

I tried it. It worked. It wasn't exactly pretty.

Then I ran into (and fell in love with) TrueCrypt, a free encrypted virtual drive managing tool for Windows and Linux. I downloaded version 3.x and never played around with it. When I heard through the grapevine that version 4 had come out, I tracked down my 3.x install, deleted it, and went to the website to get the newest version.

It is tres user friendly.

I don't have much that demands encryption these days, but TrueCrypt is there when I need it. And more to the point, it exists for Windows and Linux (I think if I ever need a UNIX-compatible encrypted drive, I'll go looking for that OpenBSD solution). But what about Macs? I have yet to find a perfectly portable Windows/Mac/Misc encrypted virtual drive solution, and that's no surprise considering how vastly different those OSes are from each other. But it surprised me to find out that Macs have this functionality built-in. It's part of the standard Disk Utility and it is every bit as wunderbar as TrueCrypt.