Jan 18, 2014

Cloud Services Like BittorrentSync Do Not Play Well With TrueCrypt: Experiments



Imagine yourself preparing for a business trip on which you will need a large number of sensitive files when you arrive at your destination. Being a sensible person, you're not comfortable having unencrypted sensitive files on your laptop, so you store the files in a large TrueCrypt container with state-of-the-art encryption.

When you open your laptop to use the sensitive files at your destination, you find that all the needed files are missing – none of them were properly synchronized to the laptop. Worse yet, you get home and find out that all the files created for the trip on your home desktop had been permanently destroyed!

Road warrior, you are screwed!

I very narrowly avoided having that happen to me during preparations for an upcoming trip. This post will alert you to things I learned that might help you avoid having such things happen to you. I discuss:
  1. Encryption tools
  2. Synchronization tools and issues
  3. Major problems with existing synchronization tools – BitTorrentSync-Beta and other cloud services

Encryption Tools

There are dozens of ways to effectively protect sensitive files on computers that you use at home or