I want to carry around a core suite of applications and ssh keys on a flashdrive at school, but t...

[G+_Ben Yanke]

I want to carry around a core suite of applications and ssh keys on a flashdrive at school, but there's no way I'm leaving keys on an unencrypted drive.

 

 

I have a pretty firm grasp of the concepts and even the math of crypt (I've even taken classes that covered it), but outside of TLS, I haven't used it "in the real world."

 

Anyone know of a good solution that can encrypt/decrypt a folder on a drive that runs on both windows and linux?

[G+_Steve Labbe]

I personally use ironkey. It is very expensive, but the security is amazing.

[G+_Ben Reese]

KeePass is the only thing that comes to mind, but it doesn't do file encryption outside it's own database. I think it should be able to hold your SSH keys though.

[G+_Eddie Foy]

True Crypt (an I guess now versacrypt) will encrypt a folder.  Well make a volume on the drive.  (Consider it a container)

Once mounted works like a folder.  You can put the TC/VC on the drive as a portable app, with the apps then have the encrypted there too.

[G+_David Wiggins]

Not only that, ssh private keys can be password protected. For instance, PuTTYgen can generate a key pair, and saving the private will let you set a password. When authenticating, you have to enter the password to use the private key. That adds a little more security to the setup.

[G+_Ben Yanke]

While the SSH keys are one part, I really need an entire folder password protected as I'd have other things like VPN certificates and RDP files.

[G+_Ben Yanke]

But thank you to those who had ideas! I'll be digging more into these...

[G+_Ben Reese]

Not sure what options there really are. Best thing I can think of is a password-protected zip file. And it could really have the compression set low for faster access. Pretty sure 7-Zip will do AES256 - I know it will with a 7z archive. Beyond that, perhaps there's something you could to with Python to encrypt each file individually? I'm not sure without trying it...

[G+_Eddie Foy]

Don't like the zip file idea.  You are unzipping, then deleting.  Leaving bread crumbs behind.  Doing a secure delete will wear the flash down prematurely.

 

Not encrypted, but interestingly obfuscated: format NTFS and use alternate streams.

[G+_Ben Reese]

Eddie Foy unless the encryption is built into the OS or the application, the decrypted files will have to be copied somewhere to be used. This doesn't matter if you're extracting a single file from a zip or handling encryption with 3rd party tools.

I suppose you could carry one large thumbdrive with all the good stuff then a few smaller and decrypt to those. The smaller drives could be fully erased periodically.

 

Security is hard. Perfect security is nearly impossible.

[G+_Eddie Foy]

Not really.  If the folder is mounted, its not writing to disk, its reading whats already there.  With a zip, you need to extract it somewhere.

[G+_Jason Marsh]

+1 for truecrypt. I used it for encrypting my EDC usb key. I would still use TrueCrypt today.

 

Perhaps if you're really paranoid just store the keys/creds in your favorite password manager inside the truecrypt volume.

 

Cryptcession!