**** For Jason

if I have an Excel file in the CryptoSuite archive..... can I just open the file within the archive, make changes, and save ......and the encryption integrity is unchanged? .....I think this is called "encryption on the fly".....

thanks so much

 

Excellent question and I really hope the answer is not what I think it is. My biggest complaint about cryptosuite is that it is good for archival purposes but absolutely horrible for any files you actually want to use and change on a usual basis. Unless I am mistaken, Cryptosuite requires you to decrypt the archive, change the file or files in it as you wish, recrypt the files into a new or the same archive and then delete the originals again. This is entirely WAY to many steps to accomplish something that is exactly what one uses computers for - to change files. And, if you do have multiple files to recrypt and put them in their old archive you must, one by one, allow the overwrite - there is no 'yes to all' button. That is also annoying. To finish I'll give you an example of a simple case where encryption is necessary and cryptosuite is not very user friendly - financial software.

Quicken, for example, creates and stores a number of files in a folder related to your financial data. What better information to want to encrypt than your financial data? In order to use quicken you need all the files decrypted. My current solution is to have those files in one folder and simply encrypt and decrypt the folder using Cryptomathics file2file - which encrypts each file as a seperate file, not into one archive - that is a really nice feature (better would be to be able to select one archive or individual files). This is a one step process - it encrypts the folder and automatically securely deletes the originals or it decrypts the folder and deletes the encrypted versions. The problem with file2file is it uses SHA-1 which has apparently been 'broken'. I won't deny Cryptosuite would be a stronger encryption alternative but then each time I want to use my Quicken software I would have to go through all the steps mentioned above. And, I would have to do it twice because I have a second folder for the backup versions of my financial files. I really want to like cryptosuite and buy it and use it but it just annoys me everytime that it can't perform an operation that is inherent to computer usage.

Of course, this is all just my humble opinion

 

Off topic post for competing software removed as per TOS.

 

This feature is half implemented (not in the public build) for a while now. Now that I can concentrate more on my own programs I suspect it won't be long until it is ready for public consumption.

 

It would be v.nice to have on the fly intercepts to file access to allow files to remain encrypted on disk and be accessed transparently as if they hadn't been touched. If that is what you are referring to then it would be good to be able to specify whitelists and blacklists so that some programs (like the application) would always go via the decrypt route and other programs would just get the encrypted file (backups etc)

 

Decrypting and encrypting on the fly doesn't seem to be very easy to implement. In the summer of 2004, there were a number of software on the Web that pretended to do this feat while hiding files, but I have tested many of them and they don't do what's claimed. They hide files and folders in various degrees of competence, but when it comes to encryption ON THE FLY (which few of them pretend to do anyway, as opposed to simple encryption), I did not find any of the ones which I tried to be successful.

I compared the original and the encrypted side-by-side with Fastlynx. In one case the two files appeared identical. I couldn't believe it, so I continued the comparison at the byte level with FolderMatch: still identical, except for the creation dates! In another case the difference between the 2 files was a fixed number of bytes, regardless of the size of the original file. This did not convince me that real encryption had taken place. Other such software could not work with USB or firewire drives. Another such program was downloaded from China from an ordinary looking dot.com site (Port Explorer identified the server was in China). This thing installed by replacing some of my Windows files with different versions (different sizes and dates). Restoring the originals from a recent back-up was a long pain because the replacements were extensive and all over. I am sure that my registry was never the same despite my effort (I did not backup the registry prior to the install).

Conclusion: I have not seen a successful ON-THE-FLY encryption-decryption program that sits between a program like Quicken and Quicken's data file and always leaves your data encrypted on disk. So I have big hopes now that I see Jason interested in this feature.