Ask HN: "Best” cross-platform disk encryption software to use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: "Best” cross-platform disk encryption software to use?

16 pointsberkut13 comments

Ask HN: "Best" cross-platform disk encryption software to use?

What software that's cross-platform (Linux + MacOS at least) and allows encrypting mount-able volumes/images (not necessarily full-disk encryption, more for very important documents like keys, etc), and possibly putting them in the cloud (for backup, and maybe on Dropbox) would people recommend these days?

VeraCrypt seems popular on the web, but searching HN for past threads about it shows (even despite previous audits) people aren't completely convinced by it.

If I was Linux-only, I could likely use dm-crypt, but I would like multi-platform support for long-term confidence and convenience, and it's not really clear what other choices I have.

View on HN

Cryptomator [1] is great in my experience.

[1]: https://cryptomator.org/

Agree, I have used it for a number of years without issues, between windows, Mac, linux and iOS.

Thanks, I'll give that a try.

Depends how cross platform and what you're willing to put up with.

OpenZFS native encryption is actually pretty nice and I think it works on Darwin.

I agree with sibling comment that you should look at encfs but note that 1. it needs FUSE and that might be a pain on Darwin, and 2. encfs doesn't protect against certain cloud facing threat models (read the audit yourself, but basically it's weak against an adversary who can see the encrypted data at multiple times).

Veracrypt probably is the answer to the question as you've asked it, but yes the software's background is... weird.

Are you sure you want disk encryption software? Because for "very important documents like keys, etc)" I'd seriously consider just using GPG (or a friendlier wrapper thereof), either for individual files, or tarballs.

+1 for ZFS. It's quite easy to shuffle around, but there are some compatibility concerns between different versions.

Much as I'm trying to use Linux on a Thinkpad, I much prefer MacOS on a MacBook Pro unfortunately (battery life, things "just work"), but I use Linux on my main desktop workstation.

So unfortunately I need fairly native and easy-to-setup MacOS support.

To be honest, Disk Image (i.e. mounting a small 50 MB image which is encrypted) is pretty much perfect for what I want.

Do you have other things besides keys that you want to store in the encrypted volume? To me, it sounds like what you need is a password manager. They can all store files in addition to passwords.

Possible things like documents, larger key files (4Kb).

I'm using KeePassX currently and yes, it does store files technically, but the user-friendly-ness of it leaves a lot to be desired. I know there are likely better options, but I'm happy with it for passwords, so...

Basically, mounting a 50 MB encrypted image on MacOS and Linux would be a perfect use-case, and will hopefully be futureproof for 5 or so years.

I didn't realise KeePass could store files too. Very convenient. Thank you!

Check out encfs. https://github.com/vgough/encfs

VeraCrypt

https://www.veracrypt.fr/

dm-crypt can create/read/write VeraCrypt-compatible volumes now.

I use rclone, https://rclone.org

Reply on news.ycombinator.com