TrueCrypt for Mac OS X: First look

February 6th, 2008 Radim Marek

If you’re not familiar with TrueCrypt, it’s very easy to use software that enables to create encrypted files/partitions on your computer and access them as normal drives – for free and with the source code available for download.

Long expected version 5.0 has been released today, bringing new functionality and – more importantly for me – adding Mac OS X support. Finally the only piece of software I wasn’t able to find alternative to since my switch to Mac is here! Let’s have a look if it meets the expectations.

Installation process is simple enough, consisting of downloading DMG image and running installer package. No surprises there. Once finished, the only thing you have to do is to locate the application icon and launch it.

Main application windows provides list of the slots for your encrypted volumes, and buttons for most important operations with them. If you’ve used the software on Windows, you should be quite familiar with it.

First thing to do is to create new encrypted file and mount it as a volume. By pressing ‘Create Volume’ you start creation wizard. You have option to create standard or hidden volume (providing additional security when you can be forced to reveal password by threat). Unfortunately, second option is not available for Mac and only thing you will get is boring message “The selected feature is currently not supported on your platform”. What a shame!

Pacified by absence of hidden volumes, you have to create the standard one instead – still quite reasonable option. The process is straightforward and you need to supply physical location of the file, it’s size (in KB, MB or GB), encryption options, pass-phrase for protection and the file system type (currently only FAT is available). When the newly created volume is formatted the wizard will start again and you can create new one or exit back to the main window.

To mount your volume just select the file and slot you want to use and by pressing button ‘Mount’ and confirming your password the drive will mount as a new device into your system. From this moment you can work with it as with any other device.

By the time you finish with it, most of the Mac users will simple try to umount the drive by throwing it to the trash or by pressing Eject button in Finder. Although it might seem the drive has been umounted successfully, if you open the TrueCrypt window, you will be able to see volume still attached to original slot. It’s not so difficult to find it in system mounted and with DMG image waiting to be opened.

I can’t say this is major problem with the software, but it’s important to realize how significant security impact this could have. By ejecting volume as usual for Mac OS X, you would expect your data being safely stored and protected. But even after quitting TrueCrypt interface that’s not guaranteed as anybody still can access the encrypted volume (because the background task is still running), unless you will dismount the volume in application itself. This lack of integration with operations system is surprising and I hope it will be fixed in coming weeks.

Compared to the Windows version, the application interface doesn’t have the same consistent design and some controls obviously need some more work. Another important functionality missing from application is ability to map system-wide keyboard shortcuts to mount/umount you favorite drives, flush the cache, etc.

No matter how pessimistic my review sounds, I would like to stress that this is a first release of the application for Mac OS X. And more importantly the main functionality one would expect from it is there – working with encrypted volumes works perfectly! It’s shame the integration hasn’t been finished to the same quality as with Windows version. But let’s hope the update will be there quickly.

To find out more about TrueCrypt, please visit project website.

PS: I’ve uploaded sample video demonstrating TrueCrypt on Mac OS (created using Snapz Pro X)

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