TrueCrypt 7.0 Released With Hardware-Accelerated AES

[phoronix]

Phoronix: TrueCrypt 7.0 Released With Hardware-Accelerated AES

TrueCrypt, one of the popular open-source programs for on-the-fly encryption, is out now with version 7.0. Most notably, the TrueCrypt 7.0 release provides hardware-accelerated AES support...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODQyNw

[thefirstm]

VIA cpus? Really? Anyone who cares about performance wouldn't get one of those...

[curaga]

VIA cpus? Really? Anyone who cares about performance wouldn't get one of those...

Their AES performance tends to be very good, and it's not away from the main CPU like with AES-NI..

[droidhacker]

truecrypt really doesn't do anything useful that you can't do better with proper open source choices, like dmcrypt/luks.

And supporting hardware acceleration only on intel platforms? Sounds like they're catering strictly to the wintel/dell crowd who can't even figure out how to turn the computer on without calling tech support.

It would be really nice to see a dmcrypt/luks hardware acceleration using gpgpu. Any cheap GPU would be awesome for this and you'd end up back again with the disk itself being the bottleneck.

[blackshard]

truecrypt really doesn't do anything useful that you can't do better with proper open source choices, like dmcrypt/luks.

And supporting hardware acceleration only on intel platforms? Sounds like they're catering strictly to the wintel/dell crowd who can't even figure out how to turn the computer on without calling tech support.

It would be really nice to see a dmcrypt/luks hardware acceleration using gpgpu. Any cheap GPU would be awesome for this and you'd end up back again with the disk itself being the bottleneck.

Actually the disk itself is still the bottleneck.
And also AMD cpus have no specific instructions for hardware accelerated AES (but still are the most efficient doing that in software).

I agree about gpu being so powerful they can deal very well with encryption

[droidhacker]

Actually the disk itself is still the bottleneck.
And also AMD cpus have no specific instructions for hardware accelerated AES (but still are the most efficient doing that in software).

I agree about gpu being so powerful they can deal very well with encryption

Depends on your CPU, depends on the encryption, even depends on the disk. In general, those machine in greatest NEED of encryption have the least CPU to deal with it and have the least need for high end graphics (and so the greatest excess of GPU).

[kevinpet]

It's misleading to refer to TrueCrypt as open source. It is distributed with source, but you aren't able to do anything with it, and it's so poorly written that no distros will touch it. See for example

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems#TrueCrypt

Accurately mentioning this problem whenever they get press is the only thing likely to get them to fix this problem. I use ubuntu's included disk encryption because I don't want to worry about whether TrueCrypt decides to stop development.

[3vi1]

Looks like their site's down at the moment. :\

[3vi1]

Looks like their site's down at the moment. :\

nm... it's back up.

[curaga]

and a PROMPT that automatically appears when you insert an encrypted flash stick.

Now this is just plain wrong. Attaching a header saying "this is encrypted" to the stick is an invitation to read it.
Without such, assuming the cipher does not totally suck, an encrypted stick should be indistinguishable from an unformatted one.