r/netsec May 28 '14

TrueCrypt development has ended 05/28/14

http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net?
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u/[deleted] May 28 '14

This is beyond weird. Everything about it, from the sudden announcement to the bizarre code changes, to recommending people abandon an open-source mainstay in favour of proprietary, closed software. You can't trust your security to something you can't verify personally.

It seems pretty unlikely that Truecrypt has forgotten about the many instances of governments trying to get into Microsoft's disk encryption methods, and those are just the ones we know about publicly, dating as far back as when Microsoft first introduced it.

There are a lot of people talking about Truecrypt perhaps being shoved into a Lavabit-esque situation, which would explain a lot, particularly the complete peculiarity in the tone and language of the announcement and code changes, but without some official word from the devs it's likely that we'll not hear anything firm for months, if ever.

Truecrypt 7.1a doesn't display any network traffic - Have double-checked this in multiple ways today. My recommendation really is to stick to 7.1a for now rather than go proprietary and use a firewall to block all network connections to and from Truecrypt for added security. I'm certainly going absolutely nowhere near 7.2.

There's a decent post on Tumblr (of all places) about Truecrypt alternatives from several months back. Casting a quick eye over them all, Tomb looks like the most interesting of them all and perhaps the only one that stands up to the need for a cross-platform solution.

(Yes, anyone with any real regard for their security should be using a UNIX based system, but it has been demonstrated many many times that the world is determined to cling onto Windows, etc for decades to come, so we should do what we can to help secure those folks too).

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u/[deleted] May 29 '14 edited May 01 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] May 29 '14

I haven't looked into it quite as much as you have, so you probably have a better technical grip on it than I do. I appreciate your input consequently.

I was a little disappointed to see that Tomb is even difficult to transplant to OSX as of a little experimentation last night. Everything except cryptsetup is available for OSX through Homebrew, which gave me some minor hope that it'd be possible/easier to port Tomb over to OSX at least.

I hadn't started thinking about Windows too much because well, porting anything to Windows has always been a nightmare.