Let’s keep it a secret!

Rememer that crazy project, where I transformed a Moleskine into a fully USB hard drive? In that post, i pointed out, that, to give that final “spy” touch, I’ve created a encrypted image, which I dropped inside the hard drive, for security of my data. Theres is a very simple way to do this in Mac OS X, and it’s a good way to keep your data safe, for example, inside a USB pen drive. So let’s get started!

Follow this easy steps, and you will have a safe container, which will be very hard to open, if you take attention to some details.
So, head up to Disk Utility, that came with your Mac OS X; this nifty piece of software, let’s you do a lot of stuff, from recording those ISO’s you download with your favorite distro, to fixing errors in your hard drives. For this project, we will create the encrypted image.

Once inside Disk Utility, just press the “New Image” button.

After this, put the settings that you see in the picture. Here I choose the image’s name secure, the syze 100mb (choose more if you want) and the important thing, in “Encryption“, choose AES-128. If you want to know more about this encryption, read some stuff.

Now, it’s important to choose a strong password, this can be tested by pressing the little key in the next window. This will show you a green bar, that grows, when password gets stronger. If you prefer, let the utility pick a strong password for you. One final thing to take in account: do not remember password in the Keychain, for improved security! So just uncheck that… Click OK, and you are all done!


Now eject the image, and move the secure.dmg inside your pen drive, or anywhere you want! Anytime you want to put new files, just mount the image (double click secure.dmg).

Very easy right? Enjoy simple encryption!