Ask yourself this question. If you leave your laptop on a train by mistake or it gets stolen, will you be most concerned about the value of the hardware or is the security of the data on your hard drive the thing that really concerns you? EncryptX feels that you should protect your data with encryption, ideally with one of its three SecurDataStor six products. The principle of encryption is easy to follow. You take a file in digital form, which means the technology is admirably suited to computers, and you apply an algorithm to scramble the data beyond recognition. When you want to open the file you decrypt it, safe in the knowledge that no one else knows the key.

Security is usually defined by the length of the key that’s used in the encryption, hence the 40-bit and 128-bit WEP that you have doubtless come across when you set up your wireless network connection. It’s generally accepted that a 40-bit key can be forcibly broken or strong-armed by a PC in a few hours. A 128-bit key is theoretically unbreakable by regular PC technology working for thousands, or even millions, of years.

Of course, there are conspiracy theories that Government security agencies have the necessary computing muscle to break 128-bit encryption if they really want to, but the key length is only part of the equation. The algorithm itself has a major bearing on the number of CPU cycles that you need to encrypt and decrypt your data.

Many algorithms are patented and rely on secrecy about their working to maintain their security, but the Blowfish algorithm at the heart of SecurDataStor is efficient and Open Source. This means its security relies on being unbreakable, rather than a hidden trick or two. Blowfish requires less than 19 million CPU cycles to encrypt 1MB data, compared with 21 million for Khufu, 24 million for RC5 and 52 million for IDEA, which is the algorithm of choice for PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).

Blowfish is also very secure with a key length of 448-bits if you crank the settings up to maximum, but if you’re going to use that level of security we suggest you use a laptop with a reasonably fast CPU, rather than the minimum requirement of a 200MHz Pentium, and the same is true of having more than 32MB of RAM.

SHARING DATA

SecurDataStor is a small application that only requires 20MB of hard drive space and it’s clear that EncryptX has wasted very little resources on fancy graphics. You change settings in SecurAdmin, which has an interface that is functional to the point of being basic. It has eight big buttons, you can’t resize it and right clicking has no effect whatsoever. We like software that does away with excessive frills, but SecurAdmin takes things a step too far as you set the security level with a slider that has no indication of the level of security that’s being applied. Instead you have a ‘lower’ label at one end of the scale and ‘higher’ at the other and are left to your own devices in between. EncryptX tells us that SecurDataStor version 6.3 will be released in Q3 and that it “includes mainly customer-driven usability enhancements and more native viewing formats”.

So hopefully this is one of the points that will be addressed. Once you’ve set the location of your Archive folder, your chosen level of encryption, and have entered a user name and password you can exit from SecurAdmin and open up SecurDataStor. This part of the software looks similar to the interface on a CD writing application. Simply open the directory tree and select the file or files that you wish to encrypt. Hit the Encrypt button and 14 tiny files appear in the archive along with the main encrypted file, which uses EncryptX’ own .ENX file format.

With the Basic version of SecurDataStor you can share encrypted files to removable media, such as CD-R or DVD-R, but if you move to the Premium version you can also send encrypted files via email or through a file server, so you’ll be able to securely transmit files. The Professional version adds group-working policies, so you can import user profiles from Outlook and lock content to a particular PC or laptop, or to a group.

SecurDataStor impressed us, however it is a fairly clunky piece of software and once you have a number of files encrypted your archive can get quite cluttered and unruly. Pricing is reasonable and the ten-day free trial of all versions should give you time to decide if this software suits your needs.

RATING 8
PRICE OPTIONS
BASIC 6.1 US $49.95
PREMIUM 6.1 US $149.95
PROFESSIONAL 6.1 US $299.95

OS Compatibility:
Windows 95/98/Me/NT4/2000/XP

CONTACT
1-888431-4550 (USA)
www.encryptx.com