True Crypt 7.0, Adds Hardware Acceleration, Auto-Mounting

A new version of the encryption software TrueCrypt 7.0 has been released yesterday, as usual for Windows, Mac and Linux systems. The jump from version 6.3a to 7.0 is more than justified by the new feature additions in TrueCrypt 7.0.

True Crypt now supports hardware acceleration; By default, hardware accelerated AES on computers that have a an Intel Core i7 or Core i5 processor where the Intel AES-NI instructions are available. Currently, only Intel Gulftown, Intel Clarkdale and Intel Arrandale processors support those instructions.

Additional information about hardware acceleration in True Crypt can be found in the docs section.

Volumes can now be configured to automatically mount whenever the host device gets connected to a computer system.

For example, if you have a TrueCrypt container on a USB flash drive and you want to configure TrueCrypt to mount it automatically whenever you insert the USB flash drive into the USB port, follow these steps: 1. Mount the volume. 2. Right-click the mounted volume in the drive list in the main TrueCrypt window and select 'Add to Favorites'. 3. The Favorites Organizer window should appear. In it, enable the option 'Mount selected volume when its host device gets connected' and click OK.

Please note that True Crypt itself is still required for the mounting.

Favorites have been added to TrueCrypt. This new feature allows the user to set specific parameters for TrueCrypt volumes, like mounting as read-only, upon login or when the host device gets connected.

Configuring favorite volumes offers new possibilities, including:

* You have a volume that always needs to be mounted to a particular drive letter.

* You have a volume that needs to be automatically mounted when its host device gets connected to the computer (for example, a container located on a USB flash drive or external USB hard drive).

* You have a volume that needs to be automatically mounted when you log on to the operating system.

* You have a volume that always needs to be mounted as read-only or removable medium.

Another benefit of configuring favorites is the ability to mount all devices at once, either by selecting Favorites > Mount Favorite Volumes or by pressing the Mount Favorite Volumes hotkey.

Lastly, partition or device hosted volumes can now be created on drives that use sector sizes of 4096, 2048 or 1024. Only file hosted volumes were supported previously on those drives.

The changelog lists one security improvement regarding the encryption of hibernation and crash dump files in Windows. True Crypt 7.0 now uses the API provided by Microsoft to encrypt those files in a safe documented way.

TrueCrypt 7.0 can be downloaded from the official project homepage.

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