I’m looking for a simple program that works to encrypt files. PGP worked well, until it started to give me MAJOR conflicts with my pc (running Windows ME).
Are there any other encryption programs that work ok? I’m not talking nuclear secrets, just some files I would like to have out of the hands of people who might steal them (large amounts of HW files and assorted art hw with graphics).
Any ideas?
Or has anyone else experienced major problems with windows ME and PGP together? If so, how did you fix it?
Try GnuPG, a PGP-workalike made by the GNU Project. They say it works fine on WinME, and they even offer a precompiled Win32 binary (Win32 includes everything from Win95 to, in many cases, WinXP). Of course, it’s open-source as well, so the paranoid (or those trying to get it to run on odd systems) can dink around with the source code until it works for them.
Since it’s a PGP workalike, its security is at least as good as PGP’s.
I’ve never heard of PGP having conflicts with WinME. Can you give details? Maybe two applications are in conflict, not the application and the OS. It’s worth looking into.
Well suddenly when I started using it I had to pretty much reinstall everything on my pc. Just all at once everything stopped. Everything.
It wasn’t fun.
Luckie: Do NOT trust programs with ‘proprietary’ or ‘secret’ algorithms. More often than not, they are of a hideously low quality (as the amazingly bad WinZip encryption scheme) and may contain backdoors (in the form of having the key encoded into the message or other dubious means). GnuPG, as PGP before it, uses the tested RSA algorithm and is open-source. Embedding an insecurity into GnuPG would be almost as difficult as breaking RSA itself, whereas fiddling with Cryptext would be as easy as making small modifications to the source code.
Beware of Snake Oil – Phil Zimmerman, inventor of PGP, wrote this article to address just this topic.
The basic philosophy of checking encryption algorithms is openness and peer-review: Don’t trust proprietary algorithms, and don’t trust anything that hasn’t been put to serious testing.
Correction: PGP uses IDEA for encryption, RSA for key management, and MD5 for generating hashes. All of them well-tested algorithms, none of them proprietary.
PKZIP, on the other hand, (NOT WinZip, sorry) uses a very insecure algorithm that was untested before the product was released. It falls to the simplest scrutiny (brute-forcing it can be done feasibly on any modern PC), and since PKZIP is closed-source, it cannot be fixed by outside help.
If you want to know more about encryption, I highly recommend the book Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C by Bruce Schneier. It’s available at Barnes&Noble for $54.99 retail. Well worth the price for the wealth of information it provides.