whats the best portable (transparent) encryption software that i could use for a flash/thumb drive? i just bought a 2gb sandisk cruzer and would like to encrypt my thunderbird, firefox and putty programs along with a database of password for my new job as a lab consultant at my university (this is the most important as it will contain passwords for alot of stuff that would be very bad if it fell into the wrong hands)

I use truecrypt on a number of machines and external drives and love it. It's free and it's secure and it's easy to use.

You may also consider this program:

Password Safe

http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/

-John

ill try those out, thanks. but after posting this i found out that thunderbird portable has a built in encryption system that will ask you for the password immediately as the application starts, w/o the password you cant do anything, even look at downloaded messages, which in the end is what i was looking for. also putty doesnt really save anything so theres no need to encrypt it and as for firefox the only thing i was really worried about is my passwords to everything, and i could set up a master password for that. as for the university passwords i downloaded keepass but havent really used it yet.

Just for the record, I find this little app:

http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Othe...krit/index.html

Overview:

fSekrit is a small application for keeping encrypted notes.

The real advantage of fSekrit is that notes are truly self-contained; the editor program and your note are merged together into a tiny self-contained program file, removing the need to install a special application to view your data.

This makes fSekrit ideal for keeping encrypted notes on, for example, USB flash drives.

Another advantage of using fSekrit is that your un-encrypted data is never stored on your harddisk. With a traditional encryption utility you would have to decrypt your file to disk, view or edit it, and then re-encrypt it, and unless you use secure file wiping tools, it would be a trivial matter for someone to to retrieve your un-encrypted data, even though you have deleted it. This can't be done with fSekrit, though, since it never stores your un-encrypted data on disk.

fSekrit uses very strong encryption (256-bit AES/Rijndael in CBC mode) to ensure that your data is never at risk.

Self contained fSekrit note files are tiny! Only 60k plus the size of your text.

very useful .

jaclaz