Legal concerns notwithstanding, there's no disputing the rising popularity of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing services among home users. Opening the contents of your hard disk to all and sundry is not without risk, though, so we were expecting this latest version of Secure File Sharing from Steganos to offer a range of security features.
Like its Internet Anonym product, it's the local privacy of the user that's central, with a password-protected Media Safe to keep downloads hidden.
This encrypted virtual disk can be up to 32GB in size on NTFS formatted disks, but Fat32 limits this to 2GB and 4GB under Windows 98 and ME respectively. As with other recent Steganos products, passwords are checked against a database of commonly used passwords.
The main services, Kazaa, Kazaa Lite, Morpheus, Soulseek, Imesh and Emule are supported, and existing downloads can be moved to the Media Safe during installation. A checkbox within the settings can prevent shared folders from being shared, but some services may not work correctly under these circumstances.
Privacy is further assured by the deletion of usage data such as search phrases and history, which are overwritten using standard data destruction techniques.
It all works well, but we can't help feeling that it is something of a missed opportunity as there are far more pressing security issues raised by P2P, which this program fails to address.
Contact: Steganos 00800 7834 2667
www.steganos.com
System requirements:
- Windows 98 or later
- Pentium class processor
- 128MB of Ram
- 15MB of hard disk space
- Up to 32GB of NTFS formatted hard disk space for Media Safe
- File sharing program
See also:
A simple, yet strong encryption package with some useful tools. 12 Mar 2004All Privacy Tools
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