Taking Your Stuff With You, Securely
One issue you have to tackle when you're out contracting is how to have your own stuff. My bookmarks, my plugins, my IRC client, my instant message client, my Skype, etc. Installing those apps at every client site is time consuming and leaves residual information about you on your client's machine. Not installing them means not having access to your support system.
The answer I found is relatively simple. PortableApps.com will let you install a good number of applications onto a thumb drive, each modified so that it keeps all of its information on the thumb drive, leaving no traces on the host computer. Sounds great, and it is. Works like a champ. I run Chrome, Pidgin, Skype, Notepad++, and other applications from it.
Of course this introduces another potential issue. What happens if I lose my USB flash drive? Now it's in the wild with all of my information, keys, passwords, etc on it. Obviously we need to encrypt that drive. For me, however, the IronKey and similar products were price prohibitive. I don't need that data secure forever, I just need enough of a lead time after losing the drive to be able to change my passwords.
Enter TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt is an open source product that allows you to run it directly from your USB flash drive as well, and has a native client for Windows, Linux, and OSX. Using TrueCrypt you can create AES256 encrypted volumes and mount them using the host machine. This means that your data is highly encrypted on the drive and any would-be hacker is going to need to figure out your password. As long as you use a good password, this should take a long, long time.
So, the quick and dirty how-to for those who can't figure it out for themselves:
- Grab TrueCrypt for your OS and install it.
- Install TrueCrypt to your flash drive as well.
- Create a volume on your flash drive.
- Mount the volume.
- Install PortableApps.
- Install any apps you want from the PortableApps web site.
- Unmount the volume.
- Take your stuff with you.
Once you're on site at the customer location:
- Insert your thumb drive.
- Run TrueCrypt.
- Mount your volume.
- Run PortableApps all day.
- Unmount your volume.
- Eject the flash drive.
The performance is quite acceptable, and the security more than adequate. And all in all it's a fantastic way to take your stuff with you.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Spark4, Inspire, LLC. Inspire, LLC said: Blog: Taking Your Stuff With You, Securely http://eric.biven.us/2010/01/29/taking-your-stuff-with-you-securely/ [...]
Truecrypt is kind of scary.
I was using it years ago, under 4.3. I made a DVD backup of my source code on it, and subsequently tried to read it under v6. It always caused kernel panics.
I finally ended up doing a virtualbox install of XP and putting 4.3 on that (as I had an exe backup just in case I needed it) – and I was able to get my data back.
I would not suggest using truecrypt for anything that you expect to be able to recover more than a few years in the future – it is stable, but not /that/ stable.
Just rot13 your backups twice. ;)