Password on flash drive

[Beef Boss]

Is it possible to put a password on a flash drive or one of its folders?

[xentropa]

Im not sure if this is what ur looking for but ciphershed can encrypt whole or individual folders in a flash drive.

 

I use ciphershed to encrypt my storage drives 

[Mira Yurizaki]

You can use Bitlocker on Windows if supported or VeraCrypt, which is a fork of TrueCrypt.

[Beef Boss]

1 minute ago, xentropa said:

Im not sure if this is what ur looking for but ciphershed can encrypt whole or individual folders in a flash drive.

 

I use ciphershed to encrypt my storage drives 

This may be a dumb question, I mean theres no stupid question just stupid people including me, but would this affect performance on a flash drive? I had my phone encrypt all new data auto and secureboot but that significantly slowed it down. I removed the secureboot and re-encrypted on the phone and all is well now.

[moltencrystal]

another recommendation of bit locker, or another solution would be a password protected rar file, with a portable copy of 7 zip or similar

[Sniperfox47]

12 minutes ago, BadluckBrian said:

This may be a dumb question, I mean theres no stupid question just stupid people including me, but would this affect performance on a flash drive? I had my phone encrypt all new data auto and secureboot but that significantly slowed it down. I removed the secureboot and re-encrypted on the phone and all is well now.

It would affect performance of the machine the flash drive is plugged into.

 

The reason most older phone's file speed slows down when you turn encryption on is not because they're suddenly writing more data. The issue is that these phones now need to encrypt all the content they're writing and decrypt all the content they're reading. This takes processing power and time in the CPU, and most older phone's either didn't have hardware accelerated cryptography or didn't make use of it for drive encryption.

 

If you're using bitlocker in windows it's fully hardware accelerated which means that like newer phones it shouldn't have any noticable impact on performance.

 

If you're using a FOSS option like VeraCrypt it will allow you to customize things more to make it more secure, and it will work across OSes (Windows, Linux, Mac) but this also comes with the con-side that not all of these options will be hardware accelerated on all systems, and may cause slower file performance.

[Radium_Angel]

Encryption is different from password protection, and yes, encryption can affect the speed, but probably not so you would notice.

[Beef Boss]

2 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

It would affect performance of the machine the flash drive is plugged into.

 

The reason most older phone's file speed slows down when you turn encryption on is not because they're suddenly writing more data. The issue is that these phones now need to encrypt all the content they're writing and decrypt all the content they're reading. This takes processing power and time in the CPU, and most older phone's either didn't have hardware accelerated cryptography or didn't make use of it for drive encryption.

 

If you're using bitlocker in windows it's fully hardware accelerated which means that like newer phones it shouldn't have any noticable impact on performance.

 

If you're using a FOSS option like VeraCrypt it will allow you to customize things more to make it more secure, and it will work across OSes (Windows, Linux, Mac) but this also comes with the con-side that not all of these options will be hardware accelerated on all systems, and may cause slower file performance.

Would this be recognized on android? I want this drive to be used on my phone, and different versions of all OS's. 

[Sniperfox47]

2 minutes ago, BadluckBrian said:

Would this be recognized on android? I want this drive to be used on my phone, and different versions of all OS's. 

Yes it could be. Out of box no, it wouldn't be accessible anywhere without first installing VeraCrypt to mount the drive. 

 

There's also no official VeraCrypt support for Android.

 

But EDS (available on the Play Store) does support mounting VeraCrypt containers though. And it's officially suggested by the VeraCrypt team: https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=android %26 ios support

[Sniperfox47]

32 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

VeraCrypt, which is a fork of TrueCrypt.

Is there a specific reason you suggest VeraCrypt over LUKS? I always thought LUKS had a better history for issues, but I haven't looked into a comparison of them recently so if there's some big advantage to VeraCrypt I'd be interested to switch over.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just now, Sniperfox47 said:

Is there a specific reason you suggest VeraCrypt over LUKS? I always thought LUKS had a better history for issues, but I haven't looked into a comparison of them recently so if there's some big advantage to VeraCrypt I'd be interested to switch over.

No reason other than it's one of the forks of TrueCrypt.

[Beef Boss]

16 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Yes it could be. Out of box no, it wouldn't be accessible anywhere without first installing VeraCrypt to mount the drive. 

 

There's also no official VeraCrypt support for Android.

 

But EDS (available on the Play Store) does support mounting VeraCrypt containers though. And it's officially suggested by the VeraCrypt team: https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=android %26 ios support

So I'm currently encrypting the drive now. I didn't need any certain hash or encryption algorithms right...? for  android support i mean. I'm new to all this, but i'm very interested in this. 

[Sniperfox47]

3 minutes ago, BadluckBrian said:

So I'm currently encrypting the drive now. I didn't need any certain hash or encryption algorithms right...? for  android support i mean

Nope. Pretty much everything VeraCrypt supports for algorithms, EDS supports too.

 

One thing to note, AES is afaik the only crypto algorithm that's normally hardware accelerated on Windows/Linux/Mac/Android machines (not sure about iOS). If you used a different algo or a combo algo it will likely not be hardware accelerated and may use more CPU power. Just so you're aware.

[Beef Boss]

2 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Nope. Pretty much everything VeraCrypt supports for algorithms, EDS supports too.

 

One thing to note, AES is afaik the only crypto algorithm that's normally hardware accelerated on Windows/Linux/Mac/Android machines (not sure about iOS). If you used a different algo or a combo algo it will likely not be hardware accelerated and may use more CPU power. Just so you're aware.

Good I used Twofish and streebog, my favorites...

 

[Sniperfox47]

Just now, BadluckBrian said:

Good I used Twofish and streebog, my favorites...

You should be aware though, especially if you're using it with Android, that EDS only supports FAT out of box, and ExFAT with a seperate download that you have to do manually for legal reasons.

 

If you're using it across OSes this is usually the safest bet anyways since support for NTFS on Mac is garbage and even Linux is pretty iffy sometimes.

[Beef Boss]

Just now, Sniperfox47 said:

You should be aware though, especially if you're using it with Android, that EDS only supports FAT out of box, and ExFAT with a seperate download that you have to do manually for legal reasons.

 

If you're using it across OSes this is usually the safest bet anyways since support for NTFS on Mac is garbage and even Linux is pretty iffy sometimes.

Crap, its an exFAT. But thats fine, thank you for this information.