At 01:05 PM 03/13/2000 +0800, Enzo Michelangeli wrote:
>Does anybody know any good Win95/98 utility providing connectoids seen by
>the user as folders, so that any file moved to and from them get
>automatically encrypted and decrypted? Something like Encrypted Magic
>Folders by PC-Magic, but with a serious crypto engine instead of their
>proprietary snake oil.
Do you really want something that encrypts & decrypts individual files? Bad!
I tried RSA's freebie that did that, and while it did use real crypto
instead of snake oil, it depended on having enough warning to re-encrypt
on shutdown (really bad assumption for a laptop), and not encrypting files
until they're closed cleanly (really bad assumption on Windows)
as well as the extra work of decrypting and encrypting things in advance.
One alternative is to use an encrypted diskoid driver that keeps its
cyphertext in a file rather than using a full partition,
similar to what Stacker and several other disk compression products do.
Safehouse and Scramdisk both do this (ask AltaVista where to get them.)
They do their encryption on a disk-block basis, not a file basis,
and decrypt blocks when reading them off the disk, encrypt when writing,
so they're never writing unencrypted data onto the disk.
You assign some space on another drive (e.g. C:\MyDocuments\Scramdisk.svl),
and when you want to use the contents, you run the mount command,
which gives you something looking like a removable drive (e.g. F:\),
which you can store files in. I assume you can build shortcuts to
point to the disk if you want files to look like they're somewhere else.
Some of these products know how to expand their space if they get full,
some don't.
NTFS has a third approach for compression, and it may also do encryption
(though it's probably just MSSnakeOil crypto if it does.)
Each file and directory can be vanilla or compressed, and they're
decompressed/compressed on the fly when reading/writing,
though I'm not sure if it's a block-by-block basis or per-open/close.
The user interface is the Windows Explorer file-system browser,
which lets you select which files will get treated this way
and which are stored as normal uncompressed files;
compressed stuff turns blue, and compressed directories automagically
handle all the files added to them as compressed.
It was a very pleasant way to handle compression (unlike the
big Double-Space blocks I needed to set up when I downgraded to Win95),
with a lot less administration work needed.
If they also did Real Crypto with it, it could be a win.
In both the pseudo-disk and NTFS-like methods, you'd have to see
how it worked mapping files across a net from a file server.
I suspect the pseudo-disk products like Scramdisk do the right thing
(or else refuse to work entirely) but I don't know if the NTFS-like
systems do the compression on the file server or the client
or just refuse to work.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
