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How to encrypt a USB drive without admin rights?
f0dder:
If you mean for Flash Drives, some manufacturers offer a utility that will allow you to partition the drive into secure/unsecured areas. Then when you run the program and enter the password the unsecured area gets demounted and the secured unlocked and mounted. eg. Imation Flash Drives, Astone' FlashUtility.-4wd (February 18, 2010, 06:49 PM)
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Forget about those - most of those "secure" drives can currently be easily bypassed. Some of them don't have any kind of encryption, others have the flash cell contents encrypted but effectively always use the same passphrase - useless.
Perry Mowbray:
I'm no expert and am pretty easily pleased; but keeping that in mind...
AxCrypt, that I do use on occasions, will encrypt a whole directory or drive of files in one go. Though if you add files they won't be encripted.
has, what I'd hope is, some recommendations. They mention some of those previously mentioned and some others and focus on the need to install and how to work around that.
It seems the first question to ask is how critical is the stuff on the drive and how serious encryption do I need? Hence F0dder's:
rjbull: the short answer is "if you want it done securely, then no".
-f0dder (February 18, 2010, 06:10 PM)
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f0dder:
AxCrypt is apparently good, but keep in mind that it's a usermode solution - meaning that to access the files, they have to be temporarily decrypted. This means the possibility of leaving residue on the computer where you're accessing the files; even if the temporary files are overwritten/wiped, it does mean they're temporarily available in plaintext... and if you're modifying them with a program that uses "save-to-tempfile-then-rename" in order to achieve safe saves, then wiping will not get rid of that residue. Also, if the target system is using an SSD, wear leveling means that the old data will be available.
tinjaw:
I have a Man Crush on f0dder because of his knowledge of all things secret. 8)
MerleOne:
I think Safehouse Explorer from Safehouse software works without Admin rights. A bit more limited (you cannot edit files from the container, you have to extract them on the Desktop for instance) but it works. I like their products a lot. Oh, and it's free. The full Safehouse suite is payware.
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