When you sit in front of your computer, you have a vast amount of information and entertainment at your fingertips. Much of it is generic and available online. But you are likely to also have a lot of personal items stored locally. Photos and videos you’ve taken. The novel you intend to finish someday. A pile of financial documents that isn’t a pile because it’s digital. If you get hacked, these items are at risk if a hacker or thief gets access to your computer. Unless you protect them using an encryption app. Which app? That depends on your method and how you store and use this private data. We have analyzed a range of these tools to help you choose the one that’s best suited for your needs.
Best for Easy General Encryption
AxCrypt Premium is considered one of the easy-to-use and secure encryption tools. You can configure it with one strong master password, and it does complex tasks such as encrypting files using the AES algorithm approved by the U.S. government and sharing those files using PKI (public key infrastructure) technology. Those you share the encrypted files with will need their own AxCrypt account, but they can take advantage of the free version of the app.
Best for Encryption Enthusiasts
Folder Lock suggests that this product simply locks folders behind an encryption system, but nothing could be further from the truth. Folder Lock can encrypt files and folders, and it can also “lock” these files and folders without encryption (meaning hiding them from view by all other programs). But it can also create encrypted vaults, which are storage containers that look and act like a regular folder when opened but become completely inaccessible when locked. For an additional fee, you can set up a secure online backup and synchronization.
Best for a Variety of Encryption Features
With Advanced Encryption Package, you can choose from 17 different encryption algorithms, far more than any competing product. You can use public key encryption to share encrypted items, although it depends on you managing the key exchange necessary. This tool offers an unusual option for encrypting or decrypting clipboard contents. Copy the text to the clipboard, then press a shortcut key, and paste the encrypted result into an email or another messaging system. The tool also has a built-in password generator, although there is no password management associated with it. However, the user interface is significantly outdated, with references to events and products that are 10-15 years old. Still, it offers a surprisingly wide range of encryption options.
Best for Ease of Use
The NordLocker encryption tool comes from the makers of NordVPN, an Editors’ Choice Virtual Private Network. You use it to create encrypted vaults, which are encrypted storage containers that provide full access to files when opened, but make them entirely inaccessible when locked. Opening a free account doesn’t require a credit card and lets you create unlimited encrypted vaults on your local device. It also gives you 3GB of online storage for shareable cloud vaults. A subscription of $2.99 a month (billed annually) increases your storage to 500GB and gives you priority technical support.
Best for Text Encryption
If encrypting data once is good, encrypting it four times is better, right? CryptoForge supports four encryption algorithms: AES, Blowfish, Triple DES, and Russian GOST. You can choose one to four of these algorithms for each encryption activity, with multiple algorithms applied in sequence. This application doesn’t take up much space on your system, as you can primarily access it from the right-click menu or by using the command line.
Best
For encrypting local files
Encryption can be a confusing topic if you don’t have technical knowledge. How can I do it? Which encryption algorithm should I choose? It seems that many encryption tools enjoy complexity. But not EncryptionSafe.
Best for sharing encrypted files for free
Sometimes, you encrypt files to protect them locally so that no one else can access their important information. At other times, you want to share, but only with your correspondent and not with any spies or surveillance. MacPaw Encrypto provides exactly this purpose and works on both macOS and Windows.
Best for steganography
Many personal encryption products work by creating a secure container, often referred to as a vault, for sensitive files. This is how Steganos Safe operates, but it offers extraordinary flexibility in creating the vault. You can create local vaults, of course, but you can also easily place a portable vault on a USB drive. There is a cloud vault option that supports Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. You can even wipe an entire part of the disk and turn it into a vault.
Best for sharing encrypted files
As the name suggests, Cryptainer, Cypherix Cryptainer PE creates encrypted containers for your files. You pay a one-time fee for a permanent license. If you can live with limited technical support and a size limit of 100 megabytes on your encrypted vaults, you can use it for free. There is an option to place the portable version, along with an encrypted vault, on a USB drive for complete portable security.
Best for simple encryption
This simple tool encrypts and decrypts files and folders, with an optional compression feature. To ensure security while entering the password, it provides a virtual keyboard. It optionally creates self-extracting executable files, useful for sharing. Secure deletion of the original assets is built into the process. If you are an expert in the old DOS box, you can control it from the command line.
Buying Guide: Best Encryption Software for 2024
In this summary, we focus specifically on products that encrypt files rather than full disk encryption solutions like Microsoft Bitlocker. Full disk encryption is an effective line of defense for a single device, but it doesn’t help when you need to share encrypted data.
You can use a virtual private network, or VPN, to encrypt your internet traffic. From your computer to the VPN company’s server, all your data is encrypted, which is great. However, unless you are connected to a secure site via HTTPS, your data traffic is unencrypted between the VPN server and the site. Of course, VPN encryption doesn’t magically apply to the files you share. Using a VPN is a great way to protect your internet traffic while traveling, but it’s not a solution for encrypting your local files.
When the FBI needed information from the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter, they asked Apple for a backdoor to bypass the encryption. But there was no such backdoor, and Apple refused to create one. The FBI had to hire hackers to gain access to the phone.
Why didn’t Apple help? Because the moment there is a backdoor or similar exploit, it becomes a target, a prize for the bad guys. It will be leaked eventually. As my colleague Max Eddy pointed out in a previous article about former Attorney General Bill Barr’s ignorance of encryption, “a backdoor is still a door and even a door with a lock can be opened.”
All products listed in this summary explicitly state that they do not have a backdoor, and that’s the right thing. But this means that if you encrypt an important document and then forget the encryption password, you may have lost it forever.
There are
Two main types of encryption products parallel these options. One type of product processes files and folders, converting them into encrypted copies that are nearly impossible to break. The other type creates a virtual storage drive that functions like any other drive on your system. When you lock the virtual drive, all the files you place in it become completely inaccessible.
As with the virtual drive solution, some products store your encrypted data in the cloud. This approach requires extreme caution. Cloud encryption data has a much larger attack surface than encryption data on your personal computer.
Which is better? It depends on how you plan to use encryption. If you’re unsure, well, all of these products are either free or offer a free trial. Take advantage of the free offers to get a sense of the different options.
After copying the file to secure storage or creating an encrypted copy of it, you must wipe the original unencrypted version. Simply deleting it is not enough, even if you bypass the recycle bin, because the data still exists on the disk, and forensic data recovery software can often retrieve it. Currently, both Windows 10 and 11 have built-in file recovery.
Some encryption products avoid this problem by encrypting the file in place, meaning it is overwritten on the disk with an encrypted version. However, it is more common for secure deletion to be offered as an option. If you choose a product that lacks this feature, you should find a free secure deletion tool to use with it.
Wiping data before deletion is sufficient to hinder software-based data recovery tools. Hardware-based forensic data recovery works because the magnetic recording of data on the hard drive is not digital, as you might think. It is more similar to a wave. Essentially, the process involves erasing known data and reading around the edges of what remains. If you suspect someone (the feds?) might use this technique to recover your embarrassing files, you can configure most secure deletion tools to perform additional passes, writing the data over what could be recovered even by these techniques.
An encryption algorithm is like a black box. Throw a document, image, or any other file into it, and you get what appears to be gibberish. Run that gibberish back through the box, using the correct password, and you get the original.
The U.S. government has settled on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), and all products aggregated here support AES. Even those that support other algorithms tend to recommend using AES.
If you’re an encryption expert, you might prefer another algorithm like Blowfish or Russia’s GOST. For the average user, AES is excellent.
Public key encryption and data sharing. Do you consider passwords important and should keep them secret? Well, not when using public key encryption for public information. With public key infrastructure (PKI), you get two keys. The first key is public; you can share it with anyone, register it in a key exchange, and tattoo it on your forehead – whatever you want. The other key is private and must be safeguarded. If you want to send someone a confidential document, just encrypt it using their public key. Upon receipt, their private key decrypts it. Simple!
Using this system in reverse, you can create a digital signature that proves your document comes from you and hasn’t been altered. How? Just encrypt it with your private key. Real
Source: https://me.pcmag.com/en/security/17071/the-best-encryption-software-for-2023
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