How To Encrypt Google Drive Files

[Gaylene Merganthaler]

Allfiles uploaded to Drive or created in Docs, Sheets, and Slides are encrypted in transit and at rest with AES256 bit encryption. For additional confidentiality, your organization can allow you to encrypt Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides files with Workspace Client-side encryption. Encrypted files have some limitations from standard files. You can also upload any Drive file types like PDFs and Office as encrypted Drive files.

Encryption is the process of encoding information to protect your data. Only users who have Workspace Client-side encryption enabled by their admin and have verified their identity can make or copy encrypted files. On an encrypted file, any user with whom the file has been shared can access it using an encryption key unique to that file. Normally Google encrypts your content in transit and at rest, but with client-side encryption your domain has chosen to add an extra layer of protection.

I've had my USB for quite a while now. It contains quite a lot of personal information on it. (I know, I'm stupid for not encrypting it before hand).Is it too late to encrypt my drive even if files are on there already?

Assuming this is a solid state USB stick and not an external USB hard drive, wear leveling, over-provisioning, and other traits of solid state media makes it difficult to securely overwrite existing data. While any new data written to the drive will be encrypted, it's likely that portions of your previous, unencrypted filesystem will remain on the device for some time. The only sure way to mitigate that problem is to buy and encrypt a new USB device and transfer data to it, then destroy your old one.

However, as the other post indicates, this may not remove all traces of the unencrypted data due to hardware specifics of memory controller/flash/etc, but it is better than nothing as an immediate course of action.

I am using Dropbox to work with various clients. If I encrypt my local copies of the files and then synchronize them, my clients have to unencrypt (with VeraCrypt) and each client needs their own password! (A nightmare to manage... even if they would be willing.)

VeraCrypt works by having an encrypted volume (a file) that is mapped to an unencrypted folder with a drive letter (L:\, for example). The unencrypted folder 'vanishes' when the file is unmounted, and this happens automatically when I switch off the computer or log out.

If I create a file with VeraCrypt and map it to a folder (D:\) and then set DropBox to synchronize with D:\ (assuming I can do this), how will the mounting and unmounting of this volume be reflected? Will unmounting of D:\ (containing the local copies of DropBox files) be seen as having deleted them, so synchronization will delete them from the cloud side? Or will it just be seen as the drive not being available (as if it were a portable drive)? And conversely, if Dropbox starts first, will the absence of the mounted folder be an issue?

I can do some testing myself - but first will have to ask clients to unshare their files with me so things don't start synchronizing unexpectedly. I'm trying to avoid asking them to do that (and then reshare them afterwards) if people already know that this does not work.

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Pretty much as I feared, and I'm trying to remove the human being (me) from the equation as much as possible. I could prevent the Dropbox app from starting until everything is ready, but therein lies madness. Mine!

I'll pass the problem on to the clients and see what their suggestions are - only two or three (so far) are affected. Either they will have thought of something already and not told me, or will not have given it a moment's thought...

I want to encrypt 1000s of old files on old hard drives before uploading them to the cloud. I'm planning to use AES-GCM with only one or a few keys. (I'm using Apple's CryptoKit library which provides this algorithm and a few others.) It would be convenient to encrypt and store the files individually, so I could download and decrypt them individually. Is this bad practice? I'm wondering if having many small examples of ciphertext could give an attacker an advantage.

A bit of background on my goals: I travel a lot and work with a laptop. Where some people would use an external drive, I want to use the cloud because 1) I don't want to be carrying around external drives, and 2) I want online storage in case of theft or damage to my devices.

I said "one or a few keys" because I don't want to store (in Keychain) or remember tons of keys. But if there is another way to generate multiple keys from a password or master key - appropriate to this situation - then I'd like to know about that.

Situation 2: The directory structure, or maybe even file names, are preserved. So if something standard like an OS config directory were encrypted, the attacker would know some or all of the plaintext for some example files.

The better one is using random information for each file like a 256-bit random bit as salt and use it together with HKDF. The HKDF can be used to derive multiple keys and even the IV. First, Extract a pseudorandom key (PRK) from the Initial Key Material (IKM) as $K_m$

The IV size is 96 since GCM's recommended IV size is 96. During the update of the file, get a new random salt and use the HKDF again. The random salt can be generated /dev/urandom/ where available or in IOS SecRandomCopyBytes.

SAI-peregrinus made a comment about the age library. I've overlooked the library and saw that it is an active library and the developers are aware of the recent incoming attacks/problems and apply patches about them.

Google Drive is generally a secure way to store data on the cloud, but as with any cloud service provider, you are not necessarily the only person with access to your data. Google owns the servers that host your data, after all, and that means Google can access them.

In simple terms, encryption takes the contents of a file and scrambles them to the extent that they cannot be read or used, and reversing the process without the encryption key is virtually impossible.

This scrambling is performed via a mathematical algorithm using a string (like a password) as a seed for the scrambling algorithm. The encrypted file has a public key attached, which, combined with a private key only you possess, can decrypt the file and make it readable and usable again.

Google, by default, uses AES256 encryption for all data created in Google Docs or uploaded to Google Drive, applying this encryption to data in transit and at rest. However, this is server-side encryption. Anyone with legitimate access to your account can still see the files in unencrypted form, which includes you, anyone with access to your account (legitimate or otherwise, as long as they have your email and password), and Google employees on their auditing and security teams.

Some kinds of Google Workspace accounts have access to client-side encryption. This encryption is limited to Work and School accounts of various types. Admins must enable client-side encryption on these accounts to take advantage of this feature.

Most of these disabled features use external or tertiary services, which cannot access your encrypted data as a security measure. Rather than try to maintain secure encryption control across dozens of services, Google simply disables the features instead.

The first available option allows you to encrypt any given file or folder before uploading it. The resulting upload will be smaller than the original file or folder, will be a single self-contained file (or split into .part files if your file exceeds the single file size limits of Google Drive or you want it broken into multiple parts), and can use a variety of different encryption protocols.

The downside to this method is that you can only access the stored version of the file by unencrypting and uncompressing it. This limitation means you have to download and extract the contents of the compressed file, which can be time-consuming and uses up bandwidth in situations where you may be limited on speed or data transfer quotas.

On the upside, this allows for a relatively secure data transfer. You can share an encrypted zip file with someone else and provide them the password through another means, such as email or in person.

This method requires you either manually encrypt each file one at a time, or encrypt a folder containing multiple chunks of data. For example, you could encrypt each song in an album separately or encrypt the album as a whole. The latter would prevent anyone from accessing an individual song and require them to download the entire album, even if they only wanted to access a single song.

Cryptomator is another app that works similarly, encrypting data and storing it on Google Drive, allowing decryption only by other devices that have the same access via Cryptomator. One difference here is that Cryptomator also has Android and iOS apps, which helps increase the versatility of your encryption.

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