HACKER Q&A
📣 berkut

"Best” cross-platform disk encryption software to use?


Ask HN: "Best" cross-platform disk encryption software to use?

What software that's cross-platform (Linux + MacOS at least) and allows encrypting mount-able volumes/images (not necessarily full-disk encryption, more for very important documents like keys, etc), and possibly putting them in the cloud (for backup, and maybe on Dropbox) would people recommend these days?

VeraCrypt seems popular on the web, but searching HN for past threads about it shows (even despite previous audits) people aren't completely convinced by it.

If I was Linux-only, I could likely use dm-crypt, but I would like multi-platform support for long-term confidence and convenience, and it's not really clear what other choices I have.


  👤 fuckcensorship Accepted Answer ✓
Cryptomator [1] is great in my experience.

[1]: https://cryptomator.org/


👤 yjftsjthsd-h
Depends how cross platform and what you're willing to put up with.

OpenZFS native encryption is actually pretty nice and I think it works on Darwin.

I agree with sibling comment that you should look at encfs but note that 1. it needs FUSE and that might be a pain on Darwin, and 2. encfs doesn't protect against certain cloud facing threat models (read the audit yourself, but basically it's weak against an adversary who can see the encrypted data at multiple times).

Veracrypt probably is the answer to the question as you've asked it, but yes the software's background is... weird.

Are you sure you want disk encryption software? Because for "very important documents like keys, etc)" I'd seriously consider just using GPG (or a friendlier wrapper thereof), either for individual files, or tarballs.


👤 electroly
Do you have other things besides keys that you want to store in the encrypted volume? To me, it sounds like what you need is a password manager. They can all store files in addition to passwords.

👤 ctrlrsf

👤 runjake

👤 boring_twenties
dm-crypt can create/read/write VeraCrypt-compatible volumes now.

👤 rovr138
I use rclone, https://rclone.org