SafeHouse keeps your confidential files in special data vaults better known as volumes. The term volume roots back to the early years of computers and disk drives. All you really need to know is that with regard to your files, these volumes are simply large encrypted container files which are used to store your sensitive information.

The magic behind the SafeHouse programming makes these volumes show up in Windows as a new drive letter, which makes them 100% compatible with Windows Explorer and all of your favorite applications.

Any file you save to this new Windows drive letter (a virtual drive) is automatically stored into the volume and encrypted.

SafeHouse gives you several easy-to-use tools for creating and working with volumes. These tools are found on the Tools tab of the SafeHouse system tray utility

These tools are all pretty simple. Our user's guide has more information on what each does and how to use them.

SafeHouse volume files are actually standard Windows files. We just access them in a special way. You can't open them with a word processor any other standard application because all you see is a bunch of encrypted junk. Only SafeHouse, in combination with your secret passord, can make any sense of these files.

Volume Properties:

• Volumes are standard Windows files. You can view, move or delete them in Explorer just as you would with any other kind of file.
• The file extension for SafeHouse volumes is .SDSK. You can easily identify them by their distinctive red folder icon (shown above) .
• The maximum size for a volume is 2,000 Gigabytes, or the size of your hard drive; whichever is less.
• You can create as many volumes as you wish.
• Volumes can be located on internal and external hard drives, USB drives, memory sticks, CDs, DVDs and network servers.
• Every volume has a password. Passwords can be changed as often as desired.
• Volumes can be securely backed up to other drives, tape or DVDs using standard backup software.
• Windows will treat your volumes as new "virtual" hard drives which are only accessible once you enter your password.
• You can choose a Windows drive letter to associate with your volumes. Use this new drive letter in Windows Explorer and your applications to work with your document files just as you always have. They'll never know the difference.
• Volumes support all drag-and-drop file operations in Windows Explorer.
• When your files are saved inside a volume, they are protected using super-strong encryption.
• When you move a file out of a volume, it is no longer protected by SafeHouse.

SafeHouse uses time-proven symetric encryption algorithms to safeguard the data under its protection. In this post, I'm going to touch on some encryption theory which will show you just how strong this stuff really is.

The first thing to know is that SafeHouse does not include any home-grown encryption algorithms. If we did, we'd be under constant scrutiny and subject to challenge by experts in the field of cryptography. There are plenty of royalty-free commercial ciphers availble for use which have already been subjected to years of discussion and analysis by the world's leading experts. In SafeHouse, we use only the best, and you'll never need to wonder if our encryption is up to the task.

The available encryption algorithms in SafeHouse include:

• Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
• Twofish
• Blowfish
• Data Encryption Standard (DES)
• Triple-DES (TDES)

Encryption strength is measured in bits. A bit is one unit of binary information (all those ones and zeros). SafeHouse Professional Edition uses 128-, 256- and 448-bit encryption strengths. SafeHouse Personal Edition only includes 128-bit encryption. The larger the number of bits, the stronger the encryption.

But what does all this mean? Is the 256-bit encryption in our Professional Edition that much stronger than the 128-bit encryption in the Personal Edition. Yes, 256-bit encryption is way stronger than 128-bit encryption. But as I'll explain below, 128-bit encryption is so strong that it's unlikely to be cracked in your lifetime, or even the lifetime of your great grandchildren.

Properly designed encryption algorithms never need to be kept secret. Computer source code and flow charts for the top algorithms are available to anyone. For any algorithm to pass muster, it must not able to be cracked by reverse engineering it. And when this is true, the typical method used to crack them is to perform what is commonly called a brute force attack.

 Quoting Wikipedia for Brute Force Attack:

In cryptanalysis, a brute force attack is a method of defeating a cryptographic scheme by trying a large number of possibilities; for example, exhaustively working through all possible keys in order to decrypt a message. In most schemes, the theoretical possibility of a brute force attack is recognized, but it is set up in such a way that it would be computationally infeasible to carry out. Accordingly, one definition of "breaking" a cryptographic scheme is to find a method faster than a brute force attack.

Another common form of attack on encrypted data is the dictionary attack. A dictionary attack is where hackers try all the words in the dictionary to see if you might have used some standard word phrase to compose your password. Although this is actually the method of attack you should be most concerned about (because as you read on you'll see that the brute force attack is computationally impracticle), I won't be discussing it in this post since here I'm more focused on the low-level encryption ciphers.

So just how strong is this stuff? Here is a great article which details the math behind how 320-bit encryption (about 40 characters long) would take billions of years to crack using an exhaustive brute force attack. Yes, that was billions - it wasn't a typo. Dialing that back a few bits for the 128-bit strength in our Personal Edition, experts generally agree that it would still would take hundreds, if not thousands of years.

The bottom line is that nobody is going to crack SafeHouse using a brute force attack. In fact, people in the know wouldn't even try because they know the math behind it all and therefore understand just how infeasible it really is. Instead, they would likely try a dictionary attack to see if you might have used a common word, such as a person's name, birth date, or something related to your hobby.

In the end, it really turns out that people (yes, my customers) are the weakest link. People are inevitably creatures of habbit, and often lazy. All too often people choose passwords which are easily found out even by the most novice of hackers.

In SafeHouse, we try to help you pick strong passwords by including a password strength meter which visually shows you how good your password is. Our Professional Edition even includes a 250K-word dictionary of weak passwords, and then warns you when you choose one from this list.

So if you want to be safe, please, pick strong passwords --- because YOU really are the weakest link.

When you create private storage vaults (volumes) in SafeHouse to hold your confidential files, SafeHouse adds a new phantom (virtual) drive letter to Windows to make it easy for you to work with your files.

The reason we chose the approach of working with new Windows drive letters to represent your protected storage areas was to create an unmistakable distinction between your confidential data and any of the other files you may have on your PC. This also makes it easy for us to completely hide all the file and folders names relating to your sensitive files.

We believe our concept makes using a privacy product like ours very simple to understand. You enter your password and a new drive letter appears. Everything you put into that new drive letter is protected. That's all you need to know.

On the other hand, products which attempt to lock individual folders on your standard C drive could confuse users because you might forget which folders are protected and which are not, and you might end up saving a confidential file to a folder which is not secure.

SafeHouse hard disk encryption is a perfect tool for distributing private data files to others.

The SafeHouse trial version is freely distributable and can be included on your CDs and DVDs if you have a need to publish or distribute private information to your customers. All SafeHouse encrypted files can be read without restriction using the trial version as long as you know the password.

My recommendation for publishing encrypted data to CD/DVD is that you include our setup program on the CD/DVD along with your SafeHouse volume file which contains your data. This way, the recipient has everything they'll need to read the data.

Although the trial version expires after 30 days, its ability to read protected data never expires. Your customers will never need to purchase their own copy of SafeHouse unless they wish to author their own encrypted files. And even then, the trial version can be used to author new files for up to 30 days.

Our approach to this is very similar to how Adobe lets you work with PDF files. The PDF reader is free to anyone, yet to create PDF documents you need to purchase their authoring tool.

The techniques just described can be used to distribute thousands of CDs, or even a single CD containing information which you cannot risk being intercepted along the way. For example, I know a number of our customers who create SafeHouse CDs to send QuickBooks accounting files to their accountants. This way, they can send the CD by mail and not worry about anyone gaining access to their records. They then communicate the SafeHouse password by phone.