Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Friday June 20 2014, @02:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the they-don't-seem-as-secretive-anymore dept.

Last month, SoylentNews reported that TrueCrypt was discontinued. Many have speculated that a fork would happen, but the TrueCrypt license makes that complicated. Now, Ars Technica reports about contact with a TrueCrypt developer on the subject:

In the days immediately following last month's TrueCrypt retirement, Johns Hopkins University professor Matt Green asked one of the secretive developers if it would be OK for other software engineers to use the existing source code to start an independent version. The developer responded:

"I am sorry, but I think what you're asking for here is impossible. I don't feel that forking truecrypt would be a good idea, a complete rewrite was something we wanted to do for a while. I believe that starting from scratch wouldn't require much more work than actually learning and understanding all of truecrypt's current codebase.

I have no problem with the source code being used as reference."

So, it looks like a fork won't happen after all. But a commenter there noted the existence of FreeOTFE, and I had previously noted tc-play. So even without a TrueCrypt fork, maybe developers won't have to start completely from scratch.

[Ed'sNote: At the time of posting, the Wikipedia entry for FreeOTFE notes that the domain has been dormant for some time. Whether work continues on FreeOTFE is uncertain. The concept sounds very much like the full disk encryption that has been available for linux for quite some time, but which does not provide plausible deniability. If I am wrong in these assumptions, I would welcome being corrected!]

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 22 2014, @06:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 22 2014, @06:13PM (#58758)

    how many here have done a serious code audit on the big ones like FF,LO,and Gimp?

    I'm an IOCCC winner and I can't get Gimp or OpenOffice to compile. Every time I run the binaries, I take it on faith that they vaguely resemble the published code.

    even if somebody here managed to do an audit of one of the above before the audit would be finished at least two new versions would be out,negating the entire audit in the first place!

    In theory, once a good known state had been reached, it would be possible to audit diffs. However, you'd have to be really fucking careful. With enough diffs, it would be possible sneak through a deliberately amateur-looking Lisp interpreter.