After a year of development, the release of the VeraCrypt 1.25.4 project has been published, developing a fork of the TrueCrypt disk partition encryption system, which has ceased to exist. The code developed by the VeraCrypt project is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, and borrowings from TrueCrypt continue to be distributed under the TrueCrypt License 3.0. Ready-made assemblies are generated for Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and macOS.
VeraCrypt is notable for replacing the RIPEMD-160 algorithm used in TrueCrypt with SHA-512 and SHA-256, increasing the number of hashing iterations, simplifying the build process for Linux and macOS, and eliminating problems identified during the audit of TrueCrypt source codes. At the same time, VeraCrypt provides compatibility mode with TrueCrypt partitions and contains tools for converting TrueCrypt partitions into the VeraCrypt format.
The new version offers about 40 changes, including:
- Added support for the OpenBSD platform.
- Added the “--size=max” option to the command line utility to provide the encrypted container with all available free disk space. A similar setting has been added to the configurator interface.
- An error is now displayed when specifying an unknown file system in the “--filesystem” option instead of ignoring the file system creation stage.
- Linux provides the ability to connect text translations in the user interface. The language for the interface is selected based on the LANG environment variable, and translation files are stored in XML format.
- Linux provides compatibility with the pam_tmpdir PAM module.
- Ubuntu 18.04 and newer releases now provide a VeraCrypt icon in the notification area.
- FreeBSD implements the ability to encrypt system devices.
- The performance of the Streebog cryptographic hash function has been optimized (GOST 34.11-2018).
- Assemblies for Windows have added support for devices based on ARM64 architecture (Microsoft Surface Pro X), but encryption of system partitions is not yet supported for them. Support for Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 has been discontinued. Added installer in MSI format. Windows-specific errors when working with memory have been fixed. Protected versions of the wcscpy, wcscat and strcpy functions are used.
Source: opennet.ru