For starters, Private Disk's feature set is only marginally more useful than either of the free / open source products described here. The user can create virtual encrypted volumes, back up the volume header for an encrypted disk, control the mounting or unmounting of disks based on user activity, and so on. The only really significant feature that isn't available elsewhere is the "Disk Firewall," which lets you grant or deny access to the encrypted volume to specific programs.
The biggest sign that Private Disk has not been written with real security in mind is a "recovery option" that attempts to determine the password of a private disk by performing a brute-force attack on the password. No serious encryption product would ever have something like this. It's like buying a deadbolt for your front door and discovering that it comes with a set of lockpicks -- "in case you lose the keys."
It's hard to give the nod to a for-pay program of this kind when the vast majority of its features are available for free elsewhere, and are probably better implemented there to boot.
Cost: 59.95 Euros ($88.73) per seat
Web site: www.securstar.com
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 DriveCrypt can conceal data in a playable .WAV file. |
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SecureStar's DriveCrypt has core functionality similar to TrueCrypt and FreeOTFE, reviewed below -- you can create encrypted containers from files or whole disks, hide encrypted drives inside each other, and so on. For more advanced functionality, like whole-disk encryption, you'll need to add the DriveCrypt PlusPack ($185). Whether or not the additional features that DriveCrypt offers are worth paying for is an open question, since many people might be just as comfortable with the feature sets in the free products.
Most of the encryption functions in the standard DriveCrypt behave as you would expect if you've had experience with similar products. You can create virtual encrypted disks in either files or partitions, automatically lock disks after a certain period of inactivity, and create invisible disk-within-a-disk arrangements. DriveCrypt also lets you mount disks created by earlier iterations of the product (ScramDisk and E4M), so if you're migrating from either of those programs you won't be out in the cold.
Some functions available here that aren't offered by the free products are the ability to freely resize an existing encrypted disk and administrative key-escrow services. (The latter is possible in TrueCrypt and FreeOTFE by manually backing up the volume headers, though.)
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