Encrypting your data

Part of an application I’m building at work requires data to be encrypted and placed on removable storage. This was always going to be a bit of a challenge, stepping up to learn how to do encryption in PHP.

Fortunately for me I didn’t have to. A couple of hours research came up with some off-the-shelf options. I tried out one called Cryptainer from Cypherix, and I have to say I’m pretty impressed.

It’s a small download (I grabbed the free version for testing purposes) and it installs easily.

Setting up the container on the USB drive was no sweat and took less than a minute. I could then run my application, which runs in a browser, and copy files into the container. They were encrypted on the fly and as soon as the container was unmounted everything was nice and secure.

Getting the files back out again was just as easy.

Simply plug the USB drive in, mount the container, and then the application can access and use the files.

The learning curve is really small, which is good because this will need to work for users with minimal computer literacy.

So if you need something to secure your files and you can’t be bothered investing lots of dollars or brainpower, give Cryptainer a go.