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To use on our world trip, we store personal information (phone numbers, credit card information, id-scans, etc) on a small usb stick. To prevent losing this information to some malicious people, I encrypted all the data (with TrueCrypt) On some machines (e.g. at my work), it is not permitted to use the software to decrypt the information. Is it possible in (most) internet cafes around the globe? Or is the security level of pc's too high? |
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TrueCrypt (unless it is already installed) requires administrator access to the computer. This will almost certainly be problematic. This even applies to the TrueCrypt Portable version. TrueCrypt is not designed to be run on non-trusted machines. Instead of TrueCrypt, I recommend you use KeePass to store this data. It is built to handle string data (passwords) but can handle images as attachments and you can add custom fields to entries so it is suitable for any data. One of the key features of KeePass is that it is portable. Meaning that the program itself can also live on the USB stick and does not need to be installed. The software even has built in protection from other software sniffing the memory it uses, making it much safer to use on untrusted computers than TrueCrypt. For added safety, upload your KeePass file to a DropBox account (or similar) for easy access even if you lose your USB stick. |
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I'm not a TrueCrypt expert but I would avoid to give access to personal and important information (like credit card number) to a computer I don't know it is "quite safe". I wrote "quite safe" because in my opinion and from my experience it is impossible to consider a computer completely safe. In your case, for example, if I were a malicious internet cafe owner (or a malicious user that used the computer you are going to use in that internet cafe) I would write a script to start downloading in background all the data from external devices to a safe location in my disk and then I would have all the time of the world to find a way to decrypt it. Moreover, with a key logger I could grep the password you use to decrypt your data (if you use any). When I travel I usually prefer the old paper to keep track of important numbers/codes and my memory to remember the passwords. |
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