Forums Help & support AxCrypt 2.1 doesn’t ask me for an encryption password Reply To: AxCrypt 2.1 doesn’t ask me for an encryption password

#4031 Reply

Svante
Spectator

Hello Rickie!

Thank you for taking the time to ask, since this is obviously something we need to get better at explaining.

I’ll try to be brief:

  1. It does not ask you for a password before encrypting, because you already gave AxCrypt your password when you “signed in”. This password is kept around for as long as you’re still “signed in”, and used for both encryption and…
  2. …it just opens the locked file just as pretty as you please because of the same reason – the password is kept around as long as you’re “signed in”. This is one of the main improvements of AxCrpyt 2 – it makes it so much easier to work with!

The green icon appears because the file is really encrypted, and renamed to end with “.axx” and that’s when Windows will display the stylized green padlock icon.

You’ll now think – but where’s the protection if anyone can open the file?

The answer is that AxCrypt will sign you out automatically when the screen saver goes active, you log out of Windows or the computer goes to sleep.

And you never, never ever leave your computer logged on to windows in a place where other untrusted people have access to it, do you? If you do, there’s really no need to bother with encryption at all. It might make you feel better, but it doesn’t provide an ounce of real protection.

It’s a little like airport security confiscating your empty water bottle. “Look, we’re preventing people from getting inside with a container that can be filled with bad stuff!”, but… on the other side of security I can buy a new water bottle, empty it or drink the water – and now I have my empty container! It’s a totally meaningless action in the name of “security”.

Encrypting your files, regardless of mechanism, and then leaving your computer accessible to anyone who walks by is also a pretty meaningless action. Why? Because, as someone said, if you let someone else have full access to your computer, it’s no longer your computer. It’s that persons computer, and they can do pretty much anything they like.  In this case it probably means quickly installing a readymade keylogger kit to pick up your password and send it so the person can open the files he or she also copied or sent out during the time they had access to your computer.

Security is also only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve encrypted your files, if you are not using your computer in a generally safe way.

With AxCrypt 2, you get both convenient usage (which means it’s more likely you’ll actually encrypt your stuff) and real security as long as you follow some simple and general guidelines for reasonably safe computer use.