What really happened to TrueCrypt back in 2014? Did anyone ever find out?
It was a widely used encryption tool, that was suddenly dropped with the message " not safe, use something else".
We have nothing but speculation. Dude could have just gotten tired. Appreciate that the developer announced no future development.
Was the developer ever heard from again? One possible theory is that they died suddenly. This is assuming that the team was actually one guy
I remeber it happening. There was no backdoor. It was during that time there was a push to put backdoors or weaken public encryption in the name of national security. Truceypt didnt want to play and were threatened with possible legal action. Rather than fight it they decided to stop the project.
It could be the same thing that happened to me. The dev could have realized what people were using it for and quit to not be a part of that.
I used to run an encrypted messenger called Tunnelgram. It had some advantages and disadvantages compared to something like Signal (signing in on multiple devices, the web, you didn’t need an existing device to set up a new one, the chat history was saved on the server (encrypted), groups were easy to manage and new users could be added on the fly and see all the old messages, but it didn’t have forward secrecy (if someone got your key, they could see all the messages you sent in the future)). After Jan 6, and reading about how the insurrectionists planned their attacks on encrypted messengers, I just didn’t want to be a part of that anymore.
that’s weird
Removed by mod
Try searching truecrypt and criminals
To explain, I read about this many years ago. It’s about a journalist who tried to find out what was happening with TrueCrypt, and it turned out it was apparently connected to serious criminals who were killing people, etc. The story is actually really interesting, and I’d love to find the original piece. I have nothing against TrueCrypt, and in fact, I used it back then and still use it now (VeraCrypt).
Maybe March 30, 2016:
The Strange Origins of TrueCrypt, ISIS’s Favored Encryption Tool
By Evan Ratliff for The New Yorker (paywall)
In isis’s training and operational planning, Callimachi reported, the group appeared to routinely use a piece of software called TrueCrypt. When one would-be bomber was dispatched from Syria to France, Callimachi writes, “an Islamic State computer specialist handed him a USB key. It contained CCleaner, a program used to erase a user’s online history on a given computer, as well as TrueCrypt, an encryption program that was widely available at the time and that experts say has not yet been cracked.”
That wasn’t the article. It was in some lesser-known magazine (maybe even a blog) and it wasn’t about ISIS or the terrorists we know today. It was written specifically about the guy who created the program and his connection to drug cartels, if I remember correctly.
