The Sandisk Cruzer flash drives all come with built in software that is, essentially, a password protected partition on the flash drive that holds all of your portable apps and files, and can only be accessed through their U3 menu (equivalent to the portableapps menu). Why can't Portable apps do this? Or rather, why couldn't they? I no longer own a flash drive with the U3 software on it, so I'm not sure if it works when there are no admin rights, but other than that, I don't see any big problems with the idea (maybe the implementation, but I do not know how to program, and couldn't say). Just throwing out this idea. I know other people have had it before, but anyways. Thanks, Brian
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Oh, and I know of TrueCrypt, but it doesn't work unless there are admin rights on that comp you're using. Thanks again, Brian
1800yolk
Unfortunately, I haven't seen many great ideas for locking a flash drive yet. Although it's a popular issue, the most common answer is TrueCrypt which does unfortauntely require asministrator prileges.
Until we can't find a better solution to locking and/or encrypting the drive, I don't seen any integration coming to the menu any time soon.
If you do a bit of searching through the forums you can find lots more info on the subject, I don't have the time to find any of the topics right now.
Sorry, and semi-welcome to the forums.
Or just ah...happy first posting.
As I understand it admin rights is needed so that the encrypted volume may be mounted as a native drive such that access to it is transparent. TCExplorer is a way of accessing a truecrypt volume without admin rights on the local machine. The downside is that it is not transparent to applications.
So as I understand it (please correct me if I am way off):
singlefile.exe could be launched via TCexplorer.
singlefile.doc could be launched from TCExplorer.
linked.exe could not be launched from TCExplorer as it won't be able to access custom.dll from the encryoted volume
singlefile.doc cannot be save directly back to the encrypted volume, but must be saved locally and then TCExplorer must be used to move it back into the volume, overwriting the existing singlefile.doc
Not saying that this is a solution, just that there could be some round about way to use this. Perhaps a generic truecrypt launcher could be built such that disk calls from the encrypted application are routed through the truecrypt aware launcher thereby allowing it to access the encrypted volume as a disk.
Sorry if this made no sense or is completely wrong.
Key ID: 0xDAE3095F
Fingerprint: 5D98 65D2 1844 21A5 76C1 F0F6 4BE6 D689 DAE3 095F
I believe what you write is correct. The issue is that in order to give you access to the file, TCExplorer retrieves the file from the volume, decrypts it, and saves it in a temporary directory outside the encrypted volume in its non-encrypted form. It is true that it also allows you to save it back again, and can delete the temporary file, but that leaves two issues:
These are not insurmountable issues, and may not pose a problem for most people. Nevertheless, to be secure an end user would need to keep track of those things, and many end users I have met would not be.
Toucan can also encrypt and decrypt files, and has the same problem of decrypted versions and deleted files.
If you can use Truecrypt most of the time (because you have access to Admin accounts most of the time) then TCExplorer will give you access to data on the rare occasions when you don't, and could be part of a solution, as long as you are aware of the limitations.
MC
Have a look at a fork of the PAM called geek.menu. http://geek-menu.sf.net. It has TC integration and worked really well if you have admin rights on the machine.
I used to use it, as I keep a little bit of personal data on my drive, and have misplaced my drive once or twice. However, due to a policy change where I work, I no longer have admin rights on my machine, so I can't use the TC integration.
[Double post removed by moderator SL]
TCExplorer is a nice addon to TrueCrypt but was build around a command line tool which is no longer maintained. And now TrueCrypt has a new version (with changed encryption) it might be impossible to use TCExplorer of new created containers.