If you are here thinking of password-protecting your documents which is available with popular office package or zipping utilities, then know this: these type of file protection can easily be by-passed or broken with the appropriate software.
Then how do you effectively protect your documents? For this task, you need a good encryption tool, which will not allow you to password-protect your data, but will also make sure your data is inaccessible without providing the password first.
If you will be using the encryption to encrypt single files only, I would recommend you to use a regular file encryption tool. However, if you want to mass-protect your files, I would ask you to use an on-the-fly disk encryption utility (OTFE). The OTFE software works by creating an encrypted container for you to store all your files in it. The container can be mounter as a virtual hard disk using the appropriate tools provided. You need a password to mount your container.
You also need to provide the encryption tool with a good password. What is a good password? A good password needs to have a combination of letters, numbers and symbols.
Here is a table which gives you an idea about how long your password should be so that someone cannot crack it. Here, it is assumed that the password is a random sequence of Latin letters.
We assume that a single user can check 10 passwords per second and an organization provided with a budget of, somewhere around $1 billion, can check 10 billion passwords per second. We also assume that the processor of the computer doubles its performance every two years. Therefore, each additional Latin letter of a long password adds about 9 years to an exhaustive key search attack. The result is this estimate of the time to succeed in an attack.
If your password is 1 letter long, it takes 2 second for a single user to find it and 1 second for an organization. If your password is 10 letter long, it takes 37 years for a single user to find it and 4 hours for an organization. If your password is 15 letter long, it takes 82 years for a single user to find it and 22 years for an organization. Therefore, you should be safe with a password of 20 letters.
To conclude this article, I would like to say that make sure you store your passwords safely for if you forget then, all your data will be lost.
Hirvesh Marshall maintains a web page on FREE File Encryption Software And Other Miscellaneous Encryption Tools (codefusionlab.co.cc/) at Codefusion Lab. Codefusion Lab is a site dedicated to provide free and useful software to other persons. You can get more software at Codefusion Lab: Free PC Tools and Webmaster's Resource (codefusionlab.co.cc).
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