If it's a matter of life-and-death, I'd probably pick TrueCrypt. But the this is a matter of probability, not certainty.Īll in all, the differences are minor, and for most use cases you shouldn't expect any difference at all from a security perspective. That's not to say that such a mistake exists, and that's not to say that such a mistake couldn't be found in TrueCrypt instead. This means that there is a higher probability that 7-zip's code contains some sort of mistake that could allow for some sort of as-yet-unknown attack. 7-zip's has not (at least not to the same degree). Here's probably the biggest difference: TrueCrypt's code has been poured over by cryptographers and carefully examined for implementation mistakes. PBKDF2 is a bit more configurable, but 7-zip's alternative is functionally similar and arguably reaches the same goals. p7zip uses a salted SHA256 hash repeated over a configurable number of iterations. It's difficult to come up with a better alternative than that. Truecrypt uses PBKDF2 to turn your password into an encryption key. See this discussion on operation modes for more information. This is certainly not necessarily insecure it's the mode most popularly used in protocols such as TLS, but it is potentially vulnerable to padding oracle attacks.

It's pretty well vetted and has withstood some serious abuse from some powerful attackers (such as the US Government).įrom examining the p7zip source code, it appears that AES encoding for the 7-zip format operates in CBC mode. Truecrypt implements a modified counter mode called XTS. If implemented correctly, AES is AES the output between two different implementations is identical, and therefore no distinction is possible in after-the-fact comparison - if done correctly, the one is exactly the same as the other.īut there are a few points where differences can crop in:

7 zip encryption