yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Dave the Knave:
I emailed them a long time asking if they would consider a port and I never heard back from them. Other people should email them and ask so they see that there is a desire for it

Sent from my Captivate
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] SiL3nTKiLL:
i would love this!
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] diablo009:
Here is the link on google android dev forms.

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=11211

Here are my posts on this: Comments 12 and 13

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=8686

Here is my post on this: Comment 101

This is the place where people can post what they want. Please feel free to post on this forum too, as it would be seen by android dev folks.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] NobleBB:
It would be super awesome if they ported it to the Android platform. In my experience, BB 9700 is a truly secure device with its full AES-256 encryption. I used to use it before i got my Captivate so i can def say i miss that feature.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] -Arturo-:
How about a mod moves this thread to main Android forum to get more exposure.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] diablo009:
+1 to this idea.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] diablo009:
U have an extra 250 MB in ur drop box now :-)
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] psych0t1c:
Truecrypt has an dedicated forum, I would say ikt would make a lot of sense to go their and propose realistic outlines/requirements of what we expect from a TC version for Android. There seem to be a lot of folks who cling to the notion of "if it is important do not put it in a handset with a Google OS because Google kis teh evil".

Voice your opinions and needs there, maybe that makes a difference.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] diablo009:
url please

i am already following abt android security on google forums
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] psych0t1c:
Is google down?

Software is called Truecrypt. Surprisingly it has an official website, truecrypt.org. Checking that one out you find a blue box on top which has a simple text link going to the forums.

http://forums.truecrypt.org

really not that hard to find. Linking the actual thread won't do anything either way cause you need to sign up for full access. Once you are, just use in site search with the term Android or something.

...this chunk of zeroes and ones has been generated by flashing a 400 Watt halogen bulb into the open fibres of a transcontinental communications cable...
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] tylergolden:
I'll give it a try.

I'm setting up a machine to work on it right now, will let you know how it goes. First attempt will be to get some sort of command-line based utility operational.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] mrgoodwords:
10 char +++
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] CLShortFuse:
I've been interested in making something like this. I do have android development experience as well.

I'm assuming opening a truecrypt container would be a good place to start.

How interested are you guys, really?
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Dave the Knave:
There's quite a few things I have on my phone that I'd like to be able to keep secure should anything happen to it. So I'm quite interested in something like this.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] CLShortFuse:
I was thinking of making an android app that allows you just take any file on the SD and encrypt it with AES and saves it as another file with a special extension (like .aes).

You would then use the program to decrypt and see the file. I think the TrueCrypt container files would be better, just because you can use the files on any machine and I don't have to make a desktop version

If the phone has root permissions, I'll mount a tmpfs or ramfs and write things there. This way, you can use the decrypted volume for any of your apps (music player, gallery, document viewer, video player) and the container will be closed/lost on reboot or when you tell the program to wipe it.

Without root permissions I would have to decrypt and extract the files to the app's ./cache folder. The problem is, the user would have to ensure the cache has been cleared. Also it's not as secure and building a virtual file system in the volatile memory.

I plan on developing it this way

AES Decryption

Read FAT partition table

Read FAT files in to byte array

Dump byte array to ./cache
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] diablo009:
Instead of making this at a file level, how abt creating it at folder level, effectively creating a container. Just my 2 cents.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] CLShortFuse:
That's what tempfs and ramfs are, but you need to have root permissions. Using ./cache means I can put it on the market. Regardless, I'll implement both methods.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] kangi26:
I think this is a great idea!. I love it, I am very interested in keeping a folder or 2 encrypted. I'm very interested
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] diablo009:
+1 from me too for the idea
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Dave the Knave:
Shortfuse to the rescue, once again!
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] CLShortFuse:
YAY!

But seriously, I've been trying to get to all these projects underway.

For SuperOneClick I have planned:

Automatically driver installation in Windows

100% Device compatibility (with bootloader and recovery replacement)

Android APK so you can root just by going to shortfuse.org on your Android device (kinda like what comex did with jailbreakme.com for iPhones)

Then there's all the coding I do for work in C#, SQL, & Java (Android Development)

As much as I would like to start right now, I probably wouldn't be able to start 'TrueCryptPortable' until 2-3 weeks from now
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] diablo009:
Not to be a spoil-sport, but this wud be something I'd be skeptical - going to a site automatically rooting my phone (I home I got the right meaning of what u said).
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] CLShortFuse:
Obviously, it won't be THAT automatic. It's a small page that allows you download an APK, which installs onto your phone. Then you run app and click Root (or w/e)

It's an Android version of SuperOneClick. It'll probably be called the same thing
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] diablo009:
Right on. So it would be something like blackrain. Great! Thanks in advance.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] HelixtheII:
ShortFuse, considering the use of CellBrite by the police to grab all data, even deleted data, off the phone, hopefully TrueCrypt style app for Android would be a boon to everybody. Go ahead, take the data, but you're not getting into it any time soon.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] fencepost:
Seems to me that the same basic techniques used by the One Click Lag Fix could be used for this kind of thing - that'd cover the phone internals, though I'm sure it would have to be a *very* custom distribution for that and it might not be feasible. For the SD (/sdcard and /external_sd depending on model) you could probably do something similar. Might need some thinking on what would happen if one or both encrypted mounts failed - would the phone work normally, but with file access going to the /sdcard mount point/folder instead? Read/Write issues? Space issues? etc.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] diablo009:
Here is one of my concepts of such an app:

1. A file manager, to start with

2. Options dialog where it lets the user enter password

3. Option to remember password for a set amount of time - say 30 mins, 60 mins, 90 mins to save inconvenience of entering it for every file

4. Select the file(s) (multi-select option here), and select encrypt. This would encrypt the file (and possibly change the name of the file if needed)

5. Once password is entered, next time on all user needs to do is to click the file and it would be auto-decrypted and viewed/edited as needed in its default editor. When we are out of the file editor we could encrypt it again manually (or encrypt it automatically).

Not sure how feasible it would be, but if anyone is interested, I would extend my help. I am not an android programmer, but can design apps.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] HelixtheII:
Reminds me of how UltraEdit encrypts/decrypts files sans the timer delay- as a working example. It creates a copy of the file and encrypts it and offers to delete the unencrypted file. (Bad example but it's what comes to mind.)
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] TRusselo:
the problem with encrypting the whole file system or even user files using programs like truecrypt and most others is it does not decrypt "on the fly"

when you encrypt a file with truecrypt it creates a new encrypted file, and deletes the original securely. to view, edit, use any encrypted file it must un-encrypt it and create a new un-encrypted copy.

every time you want to access or interact with ANY file the system must:

read the encrypted file

process the file

write the unencrypted file

-and depending on the way the program works there is deleting operations too!

-even more with secure erasing, it will basically "re-write" a garbage file overtop the file it is going to delete before deleting so no information can be recovered by normal methods.

so properly it is:

-read encryption

-process

-write decrypted

-delete encrypted....

-read original,

-process

-write encryption

-write garbage file over original

-delete original

do that for every file you need to even use or read.. let alone edit.. or the whole OS

considering the single channel - read OR write - operation of the internal flash memory of the current devices it is just not feasible to have it encrypted

..... unless you want to wait 1 or 2 MINUTES for EACH naughty PICTURE you want to view.

to make this not a completely time and battery consuming process, the phone would have to have either a dedicated on board encryption processor with a boot loader verification method ( implanted near field chip?) and or some really fast multi channel memory on the device....

however i have heard you can put truecrypt in your dropbox and use it from there to your phone or pc....
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] diablo009:
This is what I realized about this:

Instead of sharing some folder on ur computer, create a truecrypt drive, create a dropbox folder in it, and make it as base to dropbox. This way the files on system can be accessed only after u load the truecrypt volume, making them safe on ur computer.

If u meant anything else, then I am not sure about that.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] TRusselo:
dropbox has an AWESOME how to on all kinds of advanced features and workarounds that you can do. check out their Q&A advanced tricks....
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] BrainSlugs83:
That sounds wrong. Last I checked truecrypt emulated a partition which either ran FAT32 or NTFS on top of itself. Once that partition was mounted by Truecrypt all programs saw it as a native/transparent file system just like anything else.

Why couldn't this be implemented the same way at the kernel level -- replace the FAT32 module with a FAT32 over Truecrypt module that prompted you for a password at bootup?

With phones being confiscated at our borders, and police being able to legally "hack" into your phones, etc... I would love to see a fully native implementation of truecrypt for Android. The only issue I can see is speed. Flash memory isn't that slow, I run truecrypt on several flash drives just fine. I would guess the only real limitation would be the speed/memory of the phones, but with the dual core handsets coming out, I don't think that's even an issue for long.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] TRusselo:
yes, that is how it works on pc, but it cant operate that way on an android phone. wrong partition types, memory, and hard disk writing methods. Also it has been a couple years since i used truecrypt but that is "basically" how it worked.

in real time it does the read/process/write thousands of times per second, almost at the same time... (on pc)

not to mention, when it " mounts and emulates " a partition, it still has to write the information to that "virtual partition " it still has to read / process/ write...

And I was explaining how it would have to operate on our phones due to the hardware limitations. and as you can see it is really slow long process.

a couple years ago when i had a single core computer it was slow enough just decrypting photos that i was testing with.

what do you have to hide anyway? they dont care about your pot dealer that much... anything else you probably shouldnt be doing in the first place! do you really need to carry around encrypted porn and nuclear bomb plans?
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] BrainSlugs83:
It seems to run fine on my atom PC with the main drive encrypted; not to mention on thumb drives -- which I seriously doubt it's writing to my thumb drive thousands of times per second... I'm sure it's caching it to memory and just writing once in a while, or when say... I don't know... something actually changes. Though, again, I'm just speculating. -- No offense, I'm just skeptical.

You mention it can't work the same way on the Android -- even at the Kernel level? As in, NOT an application, but a ROM mod?

Sorry, to display my ignorance, I'm a long time PC developer, but very new to Android, haven't even modded my phone yet; but aren't the OSes open-source? I thought that's how the Android for i386 project was working, cross-compiling for other arches with minor portability fixes.

It seems like someone could just go modify the FAT32 drivers to do this type of encryption transparently, and during mount you would just need to modify the user-mode GUI stuff to prompt for a password that you cached in memory until you needed to mount the device again...

I think the ideal way to go would be to get this working in one of the i386 kernels first, and then trim for performance; switch to using less and less ram, slower proc, and maybe a class 4 SD card for the hdd first... -- only problem is the i386 kernels that I can find are waaaay out of date. Like Android 1.6 and such. :-/

Edit:

Also, it occurs to me that, what I really just want is an encrypted SD card. Truecrypt would be nice. But anything open source and secure would be good. As long as I'm talking about kernel mods... if truecrypt is bad for performance why not just use the JRE's built-in encryption streams? (It's been awhile since I touched Java, but I seem to remember the JRE having an analog to .NET's encryption streams...)

Or better yet, just modify the standard library's basic file streams to transparently wrap an appropriate encryption stream for all reading/writing. It would happen at the API level and not kernel at that point (at least, I think...), and it's not Truecrypt; but basically every time you read a file it would be transparently decrypted and wrote to a file it would be transparently encrypted; no other changes or protections... You could still see all file names/directories... but the contents of such are all automatically encrypted...

Now that seems like a starting point...

Edit 2:

These guys would be a good start (can't post urls yet, sorry):

developer.android.com/reference/javax/crypto/CipherInputStream.html

developer.android.com/reference/javax/crypto/CipherOutputStream.html

Edit 3:

It seems like for the security conscious individual you'd want to start unmounting the SD card during screen locks as well... -- just worried about applications that could be spying on you, or law enfarcement officials, theft, etc...
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] TRusselo:
last time i used truecrypt on a thumb drive it was pretty slow and had to create a temp direcotory on my harddrive then secure erase it. i looked into doing this to my USB drive before college, didnt like it.

if it works differently now great. if you can do it on android, even better! doing it to a SD card probably, but encrypting the OS like was being suggested by some users, doubt it..

EDIT: and modify fat32 drivers? the phones dont support fat32... as you mentioned you havent modded your phone, i would start there, learning andorid on a phone, with the phone kernels, without cross-compilers and all the many partitions and formats and lol drivers we use on the phone. There is alot hacked into and out of android and the kernel for 386 project to make it work.

im not saying its impossible, as you said write a new kernel , modify the drivers, build it into the system to do in the background....

but by the time you do all that, this phone will be dust. and comparative to an 386, by that time new phones will probably do that at a hardware level out of the box with d

na scanning!
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] TRusselo:
i see what you are sayin now, still not easy but sounds slightly more possible now, and you were right i had a complete brain fart on the fat32 on the sd card this morning.

for G2 mods check out this area for advice.

http://xdaforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1114

also check out the user guide in my sig to help you find your way around the site. (this is the captivate area).

youre going to do well here...
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] BrainSlugs83:
haha, it's okay man; I was curious myself it it supported fat32 after what you said, so that's why I had to go and test and look it up. :-)

sometimes you just know something, and then an hour or two later you realize "oh man, what was I smoking? :eek:" I'm a firm believer that the human brain is great at coming up with new ideas, and creative solutions to problems, but bad at remembering them later... stupid brains, quit being that way. :rolleyes:

Thanks for the links, and the warm welcome, btw. I'll definitely be around. :cool:
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] HelixtheII:
If you come up with something, BrainSlugs, I definitely look forward to it! Even if I have nothing to hide it doesn't mean anyone can look without my permission.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] saghaulor:
What I have to hide

I work in the medical industry in the States. We have an act called HIPAA wherein all electronic patient health information must be secured in such a way that only those who need to know should know. Consequently, if I had a db of sorts on my sd card, it would be nice to encrypt it in the event that my phone is lost or stolen. Additionally, we also have the concept of probable cause, namely, that your privacy should not be invaded without sufficient reason. However, law enforcement have been quickly eroding any idea of probable cause. It is egregiously naive to think that those with absolute power will not be corrupted absolutely. One must protect themselves, even if they're not doing anything illegal.

Furthermore, whatever I want to hide is none of your business.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] abexman:
Are there other options resources to protect yourself from your Android device being stolen? Like I think I can log out the session of gmail on my device from another PC? It would be nice to be able to do this for other services.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] charon420:
bump

Bumping thread please.

I am using the galaxy s2, and have been looking for a solution that we all are (basically, full device encryption) and have come across very few solutions... there are enterprise level solutions, but require a server side administration.. I think its called Afaria, is one that samsung is going with... It can do the remote wipe thing and prevent apps from running etc. as well as device encryption..

But not exactly what I believe we are looking for... wanting something more local ..

Thanxs!
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] dialupboy:
Yeah , I really miss something like SecuBOX from my WinMo days.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] andreYes:
Finally, I found an application with same functionality with FreeOTFE!

Here it is: LUKS Manager

(can't post a link, but you can find it in Android Market).
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] charon420:
I used LUKS too. It is really good. However it doesnt encrypt the part of the OS containg the /data directory which I think is what most are looking for.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Blu3Fr0g:
I am not trying to flame you, but almost everything you have posted about TrueCrypt in this forum has been patently wrong. It has NEVER functioned the way you have claimed and has always worked in a manner that left little or no trace of itself on the local hard drive when used from a thumb drive. It has always used on the fly encryption and decryption regardless of the entire flash drive being encrypted or using an encrypted file. When using the encrypted file it uses a special driver (under Windows, Linux and OSX) to mount the encrypted file as a drive in much the same way as you can mount an ISO CD/DVD image and access it as if it were a physical drive. Using this method, the driver then handles all of the encryption and decryption in memory as it is reading the file. So let's say you have a word document and you open it by double clicking it in Windows Explorer. When Word Loads and requests the file from the drive, the TrueCrypt driver reads the file from the encrypted area and passes the unencrypted file to Word just like the normal windows drivers would do for a regular drive. The file is never saved to the local hard drive in unencrypted for as that would be a security risk.

The standard for Flash Cards is Fat32 and they come formatted that way and you do not have to reformat them to use them in an Android device, a camera or whatever.

Technically, TrueCrypt for Debian should work on Android without modification. The reason that it will not on most phones is because, if I remember correctly, Android itself does not run native code and root level access is required to run native code.

Your thinking on security is that of the average consumer, where I think about security on the Corporate level as EVERYONE should. Most device theft's today are not done for the device itself, rather they are done for the potential information contained on them. As tablets and smartphones become more prevalent, the data contained on them becomes more valuable and therein lies the problem. I am waiting for the smartphones and tablets with fingerprint readers and completely encrypted drives. Especially considering how easy it has been shown for public charging stations to access the data on the devices they are charging.

Think about how previous viruses and trojans have worked by accessing address books and sending copies of themselves to your contacts. Now think about how many of your contacts would be upset if they started recieving spam texts, phone calls and email messages because your device was compromised.
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Willy318is:
@Blu3Fr0g

Totally, Absolutly, Theoritically and Practically (AGREE)!

Wish we have TruCrypt or at least the weaker equivalent OTFE that has been available for Windows Mobile, Check it out:

http://www.freeotfe.org/features.html
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] sblar:
What about his:

http://renzhi.ca/projects/renzhi-safe/
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] -Tiz-:
What we need is full disk encryption (aka volume encryption aka full device encryption) like TrueCrypt, Disk Cryptor, SafeGuard Easy or Bestcrypt Volume Encryption.

Everything is encrypted. Nothing will ever be in a decrypted state on the flash memory or SDCard. You type in the password when the phone is booted. No need to encrypt and decrypt single files or folders (or containers).

This is what I am waiting for ...

http://whispersys.com/whispercore.html

It also seems to include a true interactive firewall (far more sophisticated than DroidWall).
[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] kubo44:
In honeycomb there is build-in encryption

In honeycomb there is build-in encryption:

engadget.com/2011/02/02/android-3-0-honeycomb-can-encrypt-all-your-data-needs-a-full/

But maybe it encrypts only internal memory, not external storage:

stackoverflow.com/questions/4890273/about-encryption-in-android-3-0-honeycomb