CryptoExpert Lite
Although many people keep valuables or sensitive information in a safe or locked filing cabinet, people aren’t always so careful with what’s on their computers. CryptoExpert Lite makes it easy to create the electronic equivalent of a safe, giving users a secure place to store sensitive documents of all sorts. The program’s interface is fairly intuitive and easy to navigate. It’s split into three panes that let users navigate to drives, folders, and individual files. To create a new encrypted drive image file, simply click New, and the program opens a wizard that walks you through each step of the process. You can select CAST, Blowfish, 3DES, or AES encryption, as well as HMAC SHA1 or HMAC RIPEMD 160 hash function. You can also choose between NTFS or FAT file systems for the container file. If all these options just look like a jumble of senseless letters to you, don’t worry; while advanced users will appreciate this level of customization, novices can get by with just choosing the options suggested by the program. Although other versions of the program allow you to customize the size of the new drive, the Lite version limits you to 50MB. Once the new container file is created, you can work with it just as you would any other drive. It’s a lot like using a USB flash drive, except there’s nothing to plug in; you simply mount the virtual drive to get access to files, which are now safely encrypted and accessible only with a password, and unmount the drive when you’re done. CryptoExpert Lite also lets you e-mail or shred files, a nice touch. The program’s built-in Help file is well-written and thorough. Overall, we think that CryptoExpert Lite is a great option for creating a safe place to keep sensitive files. CryptoExpert Lite installs and uninstalls without issues. We recommend this program to everyone. CryptoExpert Lite is a free encryption software. It uses an on-the-fly encryption system to encrypt and decrypt data. Data is stored in the encrypted form, but when it is requested by any application, it gets decrypted on-the-fly. Conversely, unencrypted data to be stored is encrypted instantaneously and then stored. The CryptoExpert system mounts a volume file to create a “virtual drive” that appears to applications and users like any other physical drive. Any data that the user attempts to write to this drive is intercepted by CryptoExpert, encrypted, and written to the volume file. Attempts to read from this volume are also intercepted, and the relevant data is read by CryptoExpert from the volume file, decrypted, and presented to the application trying to read the data. Dismounting the CryptoExpert “virtual drive” ensures that data cannot be read from or written to it. All data is stored encrypted within the “container”. As far as windows is concerned, there is a ‘new’ disk that has suddenly appeared. When the program exists or the volume is unmounted, the file system stays encrypted and there is absolutely no way anyone can recover/get the data without the pass phrase. The latest version includes special tool to erase all personal traces on computer.