Installing SecureDoc shows you this is a serious and capable product. Encrypting the hard drive on the test machine took around 40 minutes, but worked faultlessly. A boot-up logon feature enables you to password protect the start-up process before Windows is loaded and works seamlessly. You can choose to log on with passwords only, the Rainbow USB token, or a combination of passwords, tokens, smartcards and biometrics.
The CD contains the drivers for the token and the Rainbow software development kit. It contains a manual and introduction to encryption. These documents are reasonably clear and comprehensive, but we would like to have this information in a printed manual.
SecureDoc ran faultlessly during the trial and was utterly transparent. Having encrypted a hard drive, virtual drive or portable drive such as a floppy disk or ZIP disk, files are encrypted and decrypted as you access and save them.
There is nothing else for the user to do and this is how it should be. You can only access this data if your identity is properly authenticated via the key file and password.
AES, triple-DES and DES encryption algorithms are offered together with SHA-1 and RIPEMD 160 hashing algorithms to provide comprehensive encryption options. SecureDoc also supports NTFS compressed volumes if you are using this facility.
SecureDoc Control Center and Key Management software utilities function as you would expect to give you control over the encryption process and these programs are intuitive and should provide no problems, even for first-time users.
Novices to encryption and using keys should print the manuals from the CD and study them before installation. Decrypting our encrypted volumes and uninstalling SecureDoc went smoothly, proving this is an intelligently conceived and well-implemented product that does what it claims to do.
