File Vault Help
Parisien Research Corporation
Copyright (C) 1996 Harvey Parisien
Email: emailprotected
This software is free to use.
In a recent article in Defense News (Vol 12 No 31) Aug 4-10, 1997
William Crowell, National Security Agency deputy director said ” If
a product of 64-bit strength were used by a military org… it
would take 6, 000 to 7, 000 years to recover just one message.”
1. File Vault – 64-bit (8 bytes) block encryption algorithm
variable length key up to 448 bits
File Vault – Places a number of user selected files in a single
self extracting / self decrypting executable file called a File
Vault. A File Vault can be sent easily to anyone over the
internet and only accessed with your password. The recipient of a
File Vault does not have to have any special software installed to
decrypt or access a file vault. Each File Vault is totally self
contained. This makes for easy attaching, receiving and general
use.
File Vault allows you to open the vault, access the files, then
close the vault which performs a secure wipe of the files from the
disk surface. In an encrypted file vault, filename information is
encrypted too, so if someone examines the vault with a disk
editor, no information on contents is available other than the
optional description line entered during creation. Great for ” Your
Eyes Only” files…
The encryption algorithm is the highly regarded BLOWFISH by Bruce
Schneier, world renowned Cryptographer. See VGP information below
for more detail.
File Vault is available at… www. alcuf. ca/fv
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A word on compression: When you use Winzip or other compression
utilities from Windows, they often will create temporary files
that can reside on the users system which are complete duplicate
files, or parts of files that you would rather be fully secured.
Therefore, rather than zipping files and containing them in a
vault, build a vault first which securly containes your files, and
then create the zip (or other archive) file. That way any
temporary stuff created by the archiver will be encrypted and
remain secure.
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2. Other free utilities included with File Vault
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The following utilities are stand alone utilities that reside
on your File Vault directory. These can be moved or deleted as
you wish.
DISKWIPE. EXE (and diskinfo. dll) – this utility is used to
securly remove deleted information from a hard drive to prevent
undeleting. Let’s say you have a bunch of stuff you just
deleted, and need to make sure nothing that was on the system
can be undeleted and accessed again. This utility creates a
file the size of the free remaining space on your drive and
fills it with space, then deletes it. This means that any
files recovered (by modifying your fat table) will only contain
space.
FILEWIPE. EXE – this utility is used to securly remove a file.
It opens the file, writes it full of space, then closes it and
deletes it. This way any attempt to recover the file will
prove rather uninteresting.
3. Information on VGP the Encryption Editor
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VGPWIN Encryption Editor
VGPWIN is a simple WINDOWS editor for text files, much like
NOTEPAD, but offers an optional encryption feature. VGP also uses
clipboard features that allow you to swap text to/from another
application with ease. VGPWIN will also encrypt and decrypt disk
files using the same powerful encryption routines.
The Encryption Method
The Encryption Engine is a multi-pass system by Parisien Research
Corporation. VGP gives you a high level of data protection since
one pass is the highly regarded BLOWFISH algorithm by Bruce
Schneier, world renowned Cryptographer. Because of the
implementation of the Blowfish algorithm, the encryption produced
is several orders of magnitude stronger than DES (Digital
Encryption Standard). Blowfish is a 64-bit (8 bytes) block
encryption algorithm. It uses a variable length key. The key
length can be up to 448 bits. It is extremely fast and is so
secure that it can not be sold outside the U. S. due to federal
export restrictions ITAR.
VGP and File Vault are free to use.
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How to use File Vault:
1. Select files to place in a vault
2. Describe your vault (optional)
3. Define location (default is last location)
4. Define autoexec command. This is OPTIONAL. If you want the user
to receive 1 or more files and then be forced to run a specific
file (executable or otherwise) you can place that command here.
For example, let’s say I create a vault containing a file called
beach. bmp. If I define the optional autoexec
