Also, the most significant new work - the UEFI support - seems to have quite a few issues.
Note that, despite the color-coding, the list of fixed issues is not the list of critical (red) issues!
So we have Veracrypt as the 'good enough' option right now and ease of use, but you shouldn't happen to know any secure alternatives? You seem to know a bit about this.
Data from prior work indicates it ranges considerably from significantly harder to extremely hard. The LOCK system with an Orange Book A1 development process was highly secure and gave cost breakdown. A1 assurance acyivities added around 37% or so on top of regular, labor cost. Altran/Praxis's Correct-by-Construction that does highly-assured systems with mix of Z specs, Ada, SPARK, reviews, and testing costs 50% premium on top of normal development. Just using SPARK automatically knocks out whole classes of bugs. Galois did and open-sourced CRYPTOL so people can specify algorithms in easy DSL then generate C from it. Also parser and protocol generators.
So, prior evidence shows it takes specialized skill and domain knowledge... at least two extra people unless one has both... but otherwise costs 30-50% more time. Like Cleanroom methodology, it partly achieved this by saving you time debugging and refactoring due to reduced bugs in general plus doing fixes earlier in lifecycle.
Most OSS projects dont do this stuff just because they dont know it's necessary, don't care, or don't have staff for both demanded features and assurance activities. Interestingly, there's more high-assurance products in proprietary than FOSS software despite the huge labor advantage FOSS has. That there's little of even medium-assurance work in majority of both says even worse things about IT's priorities or apathy given medium assurance cost little to nothing. Microsoft is the one exception of big, software houses via SDL and MS Research's work. For FOSS, DJB, OpenBSD, and SQLite come to mind.
It really shows the amount of resources and knowledge required for actually having safe or secure systems.
Example of new one for model-to-code-to-ASM verification https://www.umsec.umn.edu/sites/www.umsec.umn.edu/files/hard...
LOCK project was pretty landmark in all that it accomplished with Sidewinder firewall & SELinux being in its ripple effects http://www.cyberdefenseagency.com/publications/LOCK-An_Histo...
The B method is one of most successful in industry. You'll definitely see the engineering aspect in this one. http://www.methode-b.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2012/08/...
Cleanroom was early one in 1980's (start at p13) https://www.sei.cmu.edu/reports/96tr022.pdf
Note: Cleanroom had excellent results at low cost but disappeared for some reason. I saw someone recently combine Python with Cleanroom with good results. Cleanroom's compositional style means something like Haskell + QuickCheck could be great combo. If anyone tries it, let me know about the results.
For disk encryption, use whatever comes with your system. If you have no preference, Microsoft's BitLocker is excellent - it can incorporate hardware security features such as a TPM, self-encrypting (OPAL) SSD, it's somewhat easy to administer, etc.
There's probably no free OS either that can give you the confidence level you'd want, because you probably would want to have reproducible builds, a trustworthy update process (preferably with some kind of transparency log), a wide array of exploit mitigations (aslr/pie/pic, grsec kernel, maybe CFI). There's currently no free OS offering all of those.
I think it's probable that both can be broken/bypassed by state actors - I'd be happy to use either as a defence against everyone else though.
I acknowledge this is likely a super-niche problem, but if you want to use an encrypted thumb drive (or external HDD/SDD) to access data from Windows, Mac and Linux machines, there is almost no alternative. Is there any realistic alternative?
And BitLocker, even if you are on Windows is not completely trouble-free - on Windows 7, e.g. to my knowledge only the Ultimate/Enterprise editions support it. Windows 7 Pro does not.
VeraCrypt has always seemed like someone swooped down and forked TrueCrypt the moment it became abandoned, to grab all its faithful users.
Now, that's a bit dramatic, and probably not entirely true. But that's how it always felt to me -- ANYONE can just fork TrueCrypt. Why should I trust these guys in particular?
VeraCrypt 1.0 was released in May,2013[2]. One year prior.
[1] http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net
[2] https://sourceforge.net/u/yanpas/veracrypt/ci/VeraCrypt_1.0b...
The full story about him is fascinating and well worth the read.[1]
[0] http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-strange-origins-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E4M
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux
Although TrueCrypt existed since 2004 he ordered his employees around 2007 to use E4M (which would be improbable if he really developed TrueCrypt). The developer (or developers) of TrueCrypt isn't publicly known.
TrueCrypt was developed by an anonymous developer that vanished, abandoning the project. Funny how trust works.
yikes, one hell of an oversight