This article was written by Don VanSyckel, the club president, as a part of "The President's Pen". This article appeared in the October 2017 WYSIWYG newsletter.
Encrypt an Data You Travel With
by Don VanSyckel
I'm a fan of encrypting your data particularly on a laptop, thumb drive, or other USB drive you travel with. I am still using Windows 7 Pro and I use True Crypt with this to do the encryption. I leave the C: drive 'clear' or unencrypted and I have my data on a second drive which is totally encrypted. True Crypt is, or was, an open source project. because it was open source I trusted that there was no back door. A back door is a mechanism the software author writes into the program that can be used to by pass the normal security provided by the program and allow the author access. In other words, a back door in a data encryption program allows the author (or the government) to access your data.
Windows 10 has a data encryption option. Since I don't trust Microsoft I had my suspicions. Recently I read an article that claims Microsoft has a back door in the Windows 10 data encryption. This means that their data encryption on your Windows 10 PC is only as secure as how well Microsoft protects the secret of their back door operation. The things that I don't like is Microsoft was not forth coming with this information; the third party technical community had to dig this out of windows 10 and the fact that there is a back door at all. This is another reason to remain on Windows 7 Pro until there is a third party encryption package for Windows 10.
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