TrueCrypt audit effort smashes fundraising goals

Is TrueCrypt audited yet? Nope, but it will be soon. One of the world's most-used file encryption tools is about to get a full exam that will hopefully give the software a clean bill of health, after an independent effort successfully raised tens of thousands of dollars to peer into TrueCrypt's deepest recesses.

TrueCrypt's a free, open-source encryption program available for Windows, OS X and Linux that can be used to encrypt individual folders and whole disk drives alike. The program can also do some amazingly cool things like create a hidden operating system on a PC—essentially an OS within an OS—where you can keep your most secret files.

But while TrueCrypt is an incredibly nifty and widely used piece of software, the program's nearly 70,000 lines of code have yet to be placed under a comprehensive security analysis—a major problem with a tool that so many people entrust to encrypt their private data.