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Best way to encrypt/protect USB flash drive?

Carson Dyle

Carson Dyle

Diamond Member
I keep a lot of stuff on a USB key, including some personal documents. Presently, I don't have any of it encrypted or password protected.

What's a good method to protect files on the key? I'd really like to keep a file full of my various account passwords, but until I can protect it, I won't be doing that. The method would have to be secure and would have to work no matter what computer I plug the USB flash drive into?

Ideally, I'd just like to protect certain folders (or one certain folder), as much of what's on the drive is media files like music and some video.
 
How does it work? Does an application coming off of the USB key have to run and will a typical Win7 user have permission to run the application?
 
Yes, you have to run the truecrypt application, which has to load a filesystem device-driver, which requires Admin privs.
 
So I couldn't take the USB key, plug it into my buddy's computer, or a public PC at the library and view a protected file? To a large extent, that defeats the purpose of carrying files on a USB key. If I'm using one of my own PCs I'd probably just have the file in a Dropbox folder.

What if I didn't want/need encryption and just wanted to password-protect some files? Would password protected Zip files work? Does Windows 7 natively support password protected zip archives without a need to carry an application on the key?
 
There is really no such thing as password protection without encryption. Any application-level password can be trivially defeated by somebody who just opens up the file in a text or hex editor. You really do need to use an encrypted container to get any sort of protection.

Check out Portable PGP as a lightweight way to encrypt/decrypt specific files.
 
Ok, that makes perfect sense.

Is there any means that wouldn't require admin privileges on the host computer to open the protected files?
 
Carson Dyle said:
Ok, that makes perfect sense.

Is there any means that wouldn't require admin privileges on the host computer to open the protected files?
Click to expand...

A specific file encrypter/decrypter like Portable PGP doesn't need admin access. It's slightly less secure because you have to temporarily have an unencrypted copy on disk (transparent access is what requires admin privileges).
 
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