Top-notch Encryption Solution?

[FatalException]

I'm looking for opinions on what everyone thinks is the best encryption solution available today. I'm looking to encrypt files on my PC using the most secure algorithms available. I've tried PGP, and while I like its ease of use, I've heard that "big brother" can still crack almost any PGP key in a relatively short amount of time.

Any ideas on something that's more secure? I live in the USA, so I don't think exportation issues or anything should be a problem... I'm just looking for something on the level of Fort Knox to secure my data.

[VHockey86]

Getting paranoid eh spock? I thought you didn't have emotions.

Any particular reason for such encryption levels? Anything relatively complex is going to be a burden on performance.

[Bill in SD, CA]

http://www.cypherix.com/

Bill

[muno]

Not really a file encryption tool, but entire disk->
http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/

I hear that the amount of traffic on that site went skyhigh after certain events here in Finland, thus, it can't be bad

[FatalException]

Getting paranoid eh spock? I thought you didn't have emotions.

Any particular reason for such encryption levels? Anything relatively complex is going to be a burden on performance.

Performance is not an issue; security is the issue. The amount of data I am looking to encrypt is minute in comparison with the amount of data actually on my drive. Another reason I don't worry about performance is I only access these particular files about three times a week. Even if it took a few seconds to decrypt them, I would be fine with that; I just want to make sure that when the system gets shut off, the data on the hard drive is unusable to EVERYONE but me, no matter whose hands it falls into.

[VHockey86]

Whats to stop them from just taking the whole machine...?
If its anything password based, its can be cracked no matter what. Granted it might not worth it to anyone.

The concept of an uncrackable system is quite the oxy-moron....
Perhaps a more thorough solution would be to rig the case with extremely high temperature explosives. (forgive me if I'm being rediculous... its kind of late I guess).

[FatalException]

Whats to stop them from just taking the whole machine...?
If its anything password based, its can be cracked no matter what. Granted it might not worth it to anyone.

The concept of an uncrackable system is quite the oxy-moron....

An excellent point; but if your password is complex and lengthy (I'm talking upwards of 40 characters here, case sensitive, symbols, spaces, etc.) it would take even the most powerful supercomputer today a very long time to "brute force" crack the password, since clearly a dictionary attack would not work. It could be cracked; true... but if the people who want the information are willing to dedicate such decryption technology to breaking the code, more power to them... Nothing I have is THAT valuable. As it is, if you take a look at the RC5-72 challenge being run by RSA labs right now (one team's site can be found at www.distributed.net), you will see that even a 72-bit RC5 encryption scheme will take current computers over 1800 years to crack; and that's with tens of thousands of PC's working on the decryption of a single key simultaneously in a distributed computing effort (like FAD). Granted, PC speed doubles every 18 months (Moore's Law), so that 72-bit password should be cracked by the team effort by 2025, but again, I must say - the keys used by these encryption programs are 128 to 256 bits long, far longer than those distributed.net is trying to break right now. Current estimates put the death of such lengthy keys millions of years in the future, even with all of the computers in the world working on breaking said keys simultaneously.

[John Prophet]

yeah..id like to have a nice system for encrypting emails



congrats on 1000 fatalEx!

[AgentCrypto]

[elroy]

I've used Bestcrypt by www.jetico.com for several years. It makes encrypted volumes. From what I have read it is very secure, from my experience it is very reliable.
If I have a small amount of data I would use Blowfish Advanced CS 2.55 I used the 2.13 version for a long time until I went to an NTFS file system. The 2.13 version didn't support NTFS but I believe the newer version does. This is free. It was created by Markus Hahn.
http://maakus.dyndns.org/software.html

If you are truly concerned about very high security you need to think about the file remnants that might be left in the swap file also. I would look at full disk encryption or maybe an encrypted volume on a fully encrypted disk. [that should do it ]

[Siliconjunkie]

I would go with OpenSSL. You can use it to encrypt files pretty easily. You can specify the encryption method and strength etc, etc.

While not as warm/fuzzy or polished as some of the other options. It is easy enough to write up some batch files to prompt you for the password and do the dirty work.

And, IT'S FREE!

[FatalException]

Cool! Thanks for all of the great options! All I knew about when I asked about this was Windows' integrated NTFS encryption and PGP. With all of these options, now I just need to figure out which one "fits" me best.

[Keymaker]

WARNING! This is a thread revival alert!

In reference to Best(rypt, it would be best to look at the table on (r4(k48|3 programs.

http://www.disklabs.com/computer-for...d-cracking.asp