How Secure Is Iobit Protect Folder Compared With Truecrypt ?

[bangkokcitylimits]

Just curious but so far I can't find any comparison tests. How hard is it to crack IObit Protect Folder by hackers/ police etc. compared with TrueCrypt, BestCrypt etc. ?

Anyone ?

[howto]

That would be a difficult question to answer...

TrueCrypt does have a good rep and long history.

Personally,

I do not use anything from the Chinese company IOBit

since they were caught stealing and using MalwareBytes database

IOBit Theft Conclusion

http://forums.malwarebytes.org/index.php?showtopic=33217

[Crushdepth]

Truecrypt is highly regarded and offers a choice of widely accepted "industrial strength" encryption algorithms that are not considered breakable at this point in time. However, if you use some *LAME* password to protect the encrypted volume then your data is vulnerable. The level of security you have depends to a large extent on how responsibly you use it.

Personally I would never use an encryption tool that did not come from a reputable source with an established reputation. That pretty much rules out anything that comes from China.

[Darrel]

Yes, Chinese software companies are often dodgy.

Truecrypt is open source which must a significant point in its favour.

[roamer]

There are certainly people out there who believe that Truecrypt was a CIA honeypot that contains a backdoor. The fact that its open source means zilch except that no one knows who the developers are.

[howto]

^^^ as OpenBSD discovered

[Crushdepth]

Every decent encryption programme is subject to conspiracy theories. The creator of PGP has an amusing page "no back doors" which is worth a read.

There is one reported case where there is a high degree of suspicion that the US government deliberately left a back door in a public encryption standard, but it was rapidly detected (although malicious intent was never proven). The Open BSD rumour has been debunked by the way.

The current gold standard for industrial encryption (AES) was selected at an open competition organised by the NSA. The NSA are also running an open competition to develop a new generation of hash algorithms. But do you really care? If they can read your encrypted email its not like they would reveal such a capacity by handing details of your petty crimes over to the cops.

Not too many viable alternatives. You could use Windows Bitlocker but that's crap. Or you could try your luck with the commie stuff if you like.

Edited April 14, 2011 by Crushdepth

[Darrel]

There are certainly people out there who believe that Truecrypt was a CIA honeypot that contains a backdoor. The fact that its open source means zilch except that no one knows who the developers are.

Not at all. If anything is really open-source then the source code will be downloadable and viewable by anyone (well, anyone who can understand it and who has a few months to spare to work through it). If you have the source code then you can compile it yourself and know for certain that the compiled executable contains no backdoor that isnt in the code.

That's the whole point.

If the code isnt downloadable then there could be anything in it, for sure.