Encrypting Your Dropbox on the Fly
Dropbox is awesome but it doesn’t encrypt your data before transferring them to the cloud. Not that I don’t trust Dropbox, in fact, I trust them fully regarding to the data safety. But it would be nice if the data are gibberish to anyone else other than myself.
BoxCryptor is a cryptographic virtual harddisk that encrypts all data on the fly using the AES-256 standard. Encrypted data is stored in an arbitrary directory of your choice. For example, one that is synced to the Dropbox.
So how exactly it works?
Assuming you’ve already had Dropbox installed on one of your computer. Once you also have BoxCryptor installed, select the default Dropbox folder as the source directory that stores the encrypted data, and assign a drive letter, e.g. Z to it.img 1
Click OK, and type in the password used as the key to encrypt the data. Note that, this password will be used on the other computer you are sharing data through Dropbox. You will see a virtual drive appears in the Windows Explorer after this.
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From now on, start dropping files to Z: drive instead of Dropbox folder as you normally do. The data you dropped to the Z: drive will be encrypted automatically on the fly and put in the Dropbox folder.
Here I dropped two files in to Z: drive:
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BoxCryptor automatically encrypted these two files and put them into the Dropbox folder.
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Because the data is encrypted before sending over to Dropbox, it looks all gibberish even on the website.
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Then on the other computer that has both Dropbox and BoxCryptor installed, these two files automatically got downloaded and decrypted.
It works quite magically.
One thing I noticed is that there is an XML file called .encfs6.xml that looks like the key file to BoxCryptor. I would suggest not messing around with this file because if you do you may risk yourself not be able to decrypt the file you originally encrypted.
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