Diskcryptor Review

[Jessia Adachi]

Theneed to encrypt your data is more important than ever as it ensures you share files securely and prevent data theft. Encryption ensures your privacy is not compromised in any way. Good antivirus software can prevent your computer from external dangers, but it cannot help if you lose your device, or someone knows the password. The best way to ensure your data is safe is to encrypt the whole hard drive. However, the major challenge is finding the right program that offers a reliable and trustworthy encryption solution and one is DiskCryptor.

The handy feature in DiskCryptor is full disk encryption that enables the user to encrypt the entire hard drive of the system. When the users start the system, it asks for authentication before Windows boot. Once you authenticate it, it decrypts the boot partition allowing windows to boot.

The DiskCryptor was developed as a substitute for DriveCrypt Plus Pack and PGP WDE by NTLDR at diskcryptor.net. However, they discounted it after the final update in 2014, but diskcryptor.org continued the development and updates it regularly. The encryption solution is updated for use with Windows 10, adding a UEFI/GPT bootloader and other minor fixes to improve Windows 10 compatibility. If you are looking for an alternative disk encryption solution, then DiskCryptor is the one to use.

DiskCryptor is one of the best free disk encryption programs for windows that enable the users to encrypt the system and other internal and external hard drives. It is also simple to use and has some unique features.

When you start using DiskCryptor to encrypt the system partition, make restore your data. This is essential because if something happens to your system partition, you will have the operating system back. Here we will explain how to use DiskCryptor to encrypt an external hard drive. The process is the same for system partition as well.

When you click the Encrypt button, the encryption settings window opens. Here, in the Algorithm, choose the encryption from the drop-down. In the Wipe Mode, do not change anything. Then hit the Next button.

On the next page, you can either create a password or have the option to use Keyfiles. When encrypting system boot partition, do not use Keyfiles as you cannot login back to Windows. After creating a password, click on OK to start the encryption process.

The best alternative to DiskCryptor is Kakasoft USB Security. The program offers the comprehensive data security of your confidential data with multiple layers of protection and advanced encryption technique.

Kakasoft USB Security is an easy-to-use application that helps protect all the data stored on USB flash drives, thumb drives, pen drives, memory sticks, and other portable storage devices. The application protects sensitive information by offering a lock, password protection, and AES-256 encryption algorithm.

Plugin the USB drive you want to encrypt and choose it from the drive list in the application. Hit the Install button, and the application is installed on the USB drive. You can now protect the drive in any windows computer.

Although DiskCryptor is an excellent free and open-source software to encrypt your internal and external hard drives and the system partition, it has a major bug. You cannot use Keyfiles to protect the system partition as you cannot log in to windows again. The best alternative is Kakasoft USB Security to encrypt and protect your information without any issues.

If instead of fully encrypting the hard drive or encrypting the partition on which Windows is installed, I just encrypt a partition where I store my sensitive information, will it increase the chances of my data getting stolen(in comparison to the other alternatives) if my device gets stolen?

If you have a recovery partition in your disk, this one should not be encrypted, but you should encrypt all windows partition be them system or data if you want to be super safe, or only the sensitive data partition if you can accept that an attacker could find traces in temp or swap files.

The initial encryption time does not really matter IMHO. It happens only once. But 10 hours for 150 Gb seems rather weird. SATA disk io throughput should allow around 100Mb/s, so encrypting 150Gb should not exceed a couple of hours.

Encrypt the whole disk. The overhead is negligible, and you don't have to worry about someone stealing your computer and having all your data. And if you have to send your computer to repairs, you don't have to worry about stolen files or compromised applications.

Another benefit is that all data is encrypted by default, so you don't need to keep a mental process of copying sensitive data from the unprotected partition to the protected one. And if you need double protection, create a VeraCrypt volume and use it.

One benefit of encrypting only a partition vs the whole drive is that you can encrypt/decrypt the partition while using the system for other tasks, so you can encrypt it "on demand" so to say, but if you encrypt the whole disk it's decrypted every time you start up and authenticate the system.

In terms of security, as you say, if the machine gets stolen, I would say there isn't much difference between FDE and an encrypted partition in such a scenario. If you use strong encryption on your partition it's highly unlikely that your data will be compromised.

I'd say there is some benefit to using an encrypted partition / folder vs FDE if you only decrypt it when you need to access or store sensitive information and encrypt it again when you're done, so that you don't leave the filesystem in an unencrypted state all the time when you're logged in, as would be the case with only FDE.

Without having more information on the application, FDE is always the safest bet. However, for less critical data and unsophisticated attackers, an encrypted partition or virtual hard drive is probably enough.

The problem is that when you leave the Windows partition unencrypted, then you will also have an unencrypted pagefile (where Windows stores application memory when running out of RAM) and hibernation file (where Windows dumps the RAM when hibernating). When you are working with confidential data stored on your encrypted hard drive, then their content might end up in these files.

There are also other places on the system drive where confidential data might show up (depending on what information you consider confidential, of course). One thing I would always want to be encrypted is the C:\Users directory, because all kinds of applications use it to store temporary (and not so temporary) files. Whenever you view or edit a confidential file, the software you use for viewing might store information about that file in your user directory. When you are sure that you will only use programs to work with confidential files where you know that they won't ever do this, then this might not be a concern. But are you sure about this?

I cannot foresee any shortcomings with this method of encrypting a partition. I often use full disk encryption with encrypted containers within, 7z AES256 archives. So, layers of encryption. I would advise you review which AES-XTS bit size is used, and swap to AES256-XTS, as more rounds, is used. HowToGeek outlines how to use Local Group Policy Editor to change the encryption cipher used.

The four corners of SSD performance are as follows: random read, random write, sequential read and sequential write speed. Random accesses are generally small in size, while sequential accesses tend to be larger and thus we have the four Iometer tests we use in all of our reviews.

Our first test writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). I perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time. We use both standard pseudo randomly generated data for each write as well as fully random data to show you both the maximum and minimum performance offered by SandForce based drives in these tests. The average performance of SF drives will likely be somewhere in between the two values for each drive you see in the graphs. For an understanding of why this matters, read our original SandForce article.

Random write speed is a bit odd as performance does not scale up with higher queue depths. Speculating on the cause is difficult, but if I had to guess I would say it's firmware related, not NAND this time. Samsung is most likely doing some very aggressive write combining and caching so it's easy to achieve the same level of performance regardless of queue depth.

To measure sequential performance I ran a 1 minute long 128KB sequential test over the entire span of the drive at a queue depth of 1. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length.

Sequential write is pretty poor compared to today's other 256GB SSDs but Samsung is only claiming 250MB/s so this shouldn't come as a surprise. The similarity between random and sequential write speed helps back up what we mentioned earlier: Samsung is likely being very aggressive with its write combining to make random IOs look very sequential.

Cryptomator- When it comes to saving your files on a cloud server, it is important to ensure the security of those files. Keeping your delicate files out of the wrong hands can save you a lot of time and hassle. Read more about Cryptomator.

AES Crypt- AES Crypt is an advanced file encryption utility that integrates with the Windows shell or runs from the Linux command prompt to provide a simple, yet powerful, tool for encrypting files using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

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