Category: Privacy & Encryption

Most privacy minded people do a decent job locking down their computers, phones, and other devices. I hope you’re reading this article on a secure browser (like Firefox with UBlockOrigin) over an encrypted VPN connection. If you are, congrats on being a reasonably savvy internet user! But what about the other people on your network? Are your family members and guests as privacy-minded? It’s rare to find a household where every single person shares the same level of dedication to staying safe online. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could extend some level of protection to the people sharing your …

So much has been written by greater minds than mine about secure communication in a crisis. There are many publicly available resources and information on SurvivalBlog and elsewhere. Shifting letters in a message a certain number of characters is nothing new (Caesar Cipher, used in the last century B.C.). Using the SAME count to shift letters is a guaranteed way to have your encryption broken. Using different numbers to shift each letter in a message (a One Time Pad) – when your recipient has the same list of numbers to decrypt the message – is theoretically unbreakable, if you do …

(Continued from Part 2. This concludes the article.) Document Tools Being able to store sensitive files and minimizing the chances of someone finding them is useful, but you still need to be able to view and edit the files in a secure and private manner without leaving details on what files you’ve worked on and what they contain all over your system (or the Internet). Many of the commercially available document and file editing tools such as Microsoft Office store a lot of information on what files you’ve worked on and potentially what’s stored inside them (for your own good, …

(Continued from Part 1.) Hidden Rooms and Secret Passages VeraCrypt has an extremely useful feature called a ‘hidden volume’, which is what we’ll be using to hide and protect sensitive files. As I mentioned earlier, a volume is basically a chunk of storage (file) that Windows mounts and assigns a drive letter to. What VeraCrypt does is allows you to create a big encrypted file and mount that as a virtual storage volume – ‘virtual’ in this case just means that the volume doesn’t correspond to a unique physical storage device, since the file can be moved anywhere and still …

If you’re reading SurvivalBlog it’s a safe assumption you use a computer of some type, and you probably also use your computer for more than just surfing the Internet. One of the nice things about computers is that they make creating, editing, storing and moving large amounts of information a lot easier than trying to do everything with pen and paper, and a decent laptop with some solar panels for charging can operate for years even after the grid goes down. This allows you to easily create, edit and view things like inventories, maps of cache locations, communications SOPs, defense …