[Cryptography] What is going on with TrueCrypt?

[Peter Gutmann]

Peter Fairbrother <zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk> writes:

>I think they wanted to make some money out of TC, perhaps initially by
>selling it to Microsoft, but failed to do so - most recently by a
>crowdsourcing plan and a contributions campaign.

While people are throwing out random scenarios, here's another: We know that
the TC developer (and I'm going to use the singular here because I'd be
surprised if there was more than one person working on it) sets great store by
the "plausible-deniability" features of TC.  The warning text "Using TrueCrypt
is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues" could simply mean
that they've talked to a lawyer and found out that all of the plausible
deniability in TC isn't and doesn't.  So if the primary goal of TC was to
create a P-D data-at-rest encryption solution rather than just a pretty good
generic data-at-rest encryption solution then this may have motivated him (and
yes, I'm using that one consciously as well) to give up further work on it.

(Hey, I reckon that's at least as random as anyone else's speculation :-).

Peter.