Based on the wording of its license, there was always a question mark surrounding the open source-ness of Truecrypt. But that’s not the topic of this brief article. What prompted me to write this is an article that appeared in the Washington Post suggesting that TrueCrypt may have seen its last days as an (“open source”) software project.
TrueCrypt was a cross-platform (Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows) disk encryption software. The last article I wrote about it on this website was Should Truecrypt be audited?.
A quick trip to the project’s website, or what used to be the project’s website, confirmed the gist of the Washington Post article. If you try to visit http://truecrypt, you’ll actually be redirected to http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net. And the only conclusion that I can draw by looking at the contents of the website is that TrueCrypt is dead. Microsoft Windows users are encouraged to migrate to BitLocker, that operating system’s disk encryption utility, while Linux users are encouraged to “use any integrated support for encryption.” The latest download links are only for users “migrating data encrypted by TrueCrypt.” That really seals it. You cannot encrypt a disk using the latest version of TrueCrypt, only decrypt.
TrueCrypt has been discontinued?
Not that I’m going to miss TrueCrypt, but it would have been better for the its developers to provide a little bit more information on what led to this sudden change in the project’s status.
