TrueCrypt is een encryptieprogramma waarmee fysieke (een harde schijf of een partitie) en virtuele volumes (een bestand dat als partitie wordt benaderd) versleuteld kunnen worden. Voor het encrypten kan gebruik worden gemaakt van een aantal verschillende methodes zoals AES (256-bit), Blowfish (448-bit), CAST5 (128-bit), Serpent (256-bit), Triple DES en Twofish (256-bit). Ook kunnen ze opeenvolgend worden gebruikt zodat een bestand eerst wordt versleuteld met AES en vervolgens met Serpent.
De ontwikkelaars van TrueCrypt hebben versie 4.3 uitgebracht waarmee het pakket volledige ondersteuning heeft gekregen voor Windows Vista, zowel 32- als 64-bits. Verder zijn er verschillende verbeteringen doorgevoerd, zoals het vergroten van de limiet van een FAT32-volume. De lijst met veranderingen ziet er als volgt uit:
New features:Improvements:
- Full compatibility with 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista:
- Support for User Account Control (UAC).
- All .sys and .exe files of TrueCrypt are now digitally signed with the digital certificate of the TrueCrypt Foundation, which was issued by the certification authority GlobalSign.
- When moving the mouse on a single-CPU computer while reading or writing data to a TrueCrypt volume, the mouse pointer stopped moving for a second every few seconds. This will no longer occur. (Windows Vista issue)
- Other minor compatibility-related changes.
- TrueCrypt volume is automatically dismounted if its host device is inadvertently removed.
Important: Before you physically remove a device (such as a USB flash drive) where a TrueCrypt volume resides, you should always dismount the volume in TrueCrypt first, and then perform the 'Eject' operation (right-click the host device in the 'Computer' or 'My Computer' list) or use the 'Safely Remove Hardware' function (built in Windows, accessible via the taskbar notification area).- Support for devices and file systems that use a sector size other than 512 bytes (e.g., new hard drives, USB flash drives, DVD-RAM, MP3 players, etc.)
- Support for devices with a GPT partition table (GUID partitions). (Windows Vista/2003/XP)
- After a partition is successfully encrypted, the drive letter assigned to it (if any) is automatically removed. (Windows)
- Volume name (label) is displayed in device/partition selector. (Windows)
- New hotkey: 'Wipe Cache'. (Windows)
- New command line switch '/q background' for launching the TrueCrypt Background Task. (Windows)
Bug fixes:
- Portions of the TrueCrypt device driver redesigned.
- Maximum allowed size of FAT32 volumes increased to 2 TB (note that NTFS volumes can be larger than 2 TB).
- Traveller Disk Setup improved. (Windows)
- Volumes hosted on read-only media will always be mounted in read-only mode. (Windows)
- Improved support for big-endian platforms.
- Other minor improvements (Windows and Linux)
Security improvements:
- The built-in FAT format facility now functions correctly on big-endian platforms.
- Improved handling of partitions and devices during volume creation. (Windows)
- Improved handling of low-memory conditions. (Windows)
- Fixed bug that rarely caused system errors when dismounting all volumes. (Windows)
- Tray icon is recreated when Windows Explorer is restarted (e.g. after a system crash).
- Other minor bug fixes. (Windows and Linux)
Miscellaneous:
- Improved security of set-euid mode of execution. Volume can be dismounted only by the user who mounted it or by an administrator (root). (Linux)
Removed features:
- The option 'Cache passwords and keyfiles in memory' in the password prompt dialog window no longer sets the default setting (to set the default setting, select Settings > Preferences and enable or disable the option 'Cache passwords in driver memory'). (Windows)
- It is no longer possible to create new volumes encrypted with 64-bit-block encryption algorithms (Blowfish, CAST-128, and Triple DES). 64-bit block ciphers are being phased out. It is still possible to mount such volumes using this version of TrueCrypt. However, it will not be possible to mount such volumes using TrueCrypt 5.0 and later versions (this applies also to volumes encrypted with AES-Blowfish and AES-Blowfish-Serpent, which have been in the process of being phased out since TrueCrypt 4.1). If you have such a volume, we recommend that you create a new TrueCrypt volume encrypted with a 128-bit-block encryption algorithm (e.g., AES, Serpent, Twofish, etc.) and that you move files from the old volume to the new one.