DiskCryptor is a free and open-sourcefull disk encryption system for Microsoft Windows. It allows for the encryption of a PC's entire hard drive or individual partitions – including the ability to encrypt the partition and disk on which the OS is installed. DiskCryptor was originally designed to replace commercial disk encryption systems such as DriveCrypt Plus Pack and PGP Whole Disk Encryption, and uses either AES-256, Twofish, Serpent or a combination of cascaded algorithms in XTS mode to carry out encryption. The project was originally started by a former TrueCrypt user and forum member who goes by the name of 'ntldr'. According to the developer, it was originally fully compatible with TrueCrypt's container format as it used a corresponding partition format and encrypted data with AES-256 algorithm in LRW mode. However, according to the software's website, has since improved on the format in order to allow data-in-place encryption on Windows XP, to allow the system partition to have exactly the same format as non-system partitions and to support future project plans. Since the original TrueCrypt was discontinued and DiskCryptor, as an alternative, has not been updated since 2014, other alternatives have appeared, most notably the source-available project VeraCrypt, as well as numerous other commercial and open-source products.
* Full support for encryption of external USB storage devices.
* Automatic mounting of disk partitions and external storage devices.
Support for hotkeys and optional command-line interface.
Open license GNU GPLv3.
For limitations in the current version, as well as other technical information, see .
Encryption algorithms
AES-256
Serpent
Twofish
All algorithms are implemented in XTS mode.
Hash function
prf HMAC-SHA-512
Performance
On an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU data encryption speed amounts to 104 MB/s per core. Crypto-algorithms for the x86 version are implemented in assembly language, the implementation having a maximum number of optimizations for the Intel Core line of processors, however it performs sufficiently fast on any other processor as well. Almost all possible enhancements to improve the performance have been applied such as the AES algorithm code is being dynamically generated with optimization made for the usage of a particular key.
