ENCRYPT THE FILESYSTEM WITH BESTCRYPT

There has been a large movement toward the acceptance and usage of encryption tools by the general public. Tools such as GnuPG on Linux and PGP on Windows have allowed people to securely send mail over insecure networks and protect documents and files on the system through encryption.

In addition, encrypted filesystems are starting to become more common. An encrypted filesystem is usually an entire partition or file mounted via the loopback interface that's protected with a long passphrase and encrypted with one of a variety of different available encryption algorithms. To access the data, the passphrase is required.

One software utility, BestCrypt, uses the loopback filesystem to mount encrypted files as filesystems. The filesystem is encrypted--mounted or unmounted--with BestCrypt's bctool.

With BestCrypt for Linux, you can encrypt entire directories to protect your data. For example, if you're on a laptop, you might consider placing your ~/.gnupg and ~/.ssh directories into an encrypted filesystem. Doing
so will prevent anyone from stealing your GPG private key or your SSH private key.

BestCrypt is free for Linux users. However, you have to build it from the source code because the Linux binaries for BestCrypt are not provided.

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