FreeOTFE

FreeOTFE

FreeOTFE running on Windows XP
Developer(s)	Sarah Dean
Stable release	5.21 / 7 February 2010; 6 years ago (2010-02-07)
Operating system	Microsoft Windows and Windows Mobile
Available in	Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Russian and Spanish
Type	Disk encryption software
License	Free and open-source software that requires attribution
Website	FreeOTFE at the Wayback Machine (archived May 31, 2013)

FreeOTFE is a discontinued open source computer program for on-the-fly disk encryption (OTFE). On Microsoft Windows, and Windows Mobile (using FreeOTFE4PDA), it can create a virtual drive within a file or partition, to which anything written is automatically encrypted before being stored on a computer's hard or USB drive. It is similar in function to other disk encryption programs including TrueCrypt and Microsoft's BitLocker.

The author, Sarah Dean, went absent as of 2011. The FreeOTFE website is unreachable as of June 2013 and the domain name is now registered by a domain squatter. The original program can be downloaded from a mirror at Sourceforge. In June 2014, a fork of the project now named LibreCrypt appeared on GitHub.

FreeOTFE was initially released by Sarah Dean in 2004, and was the first open source code disk encryption system that provided a modular architecture allowing 3rd parties to implement additional algorithms if needed. Older FreeOTFE licensing required that any modification to the program be placed in the public domain. This does not conform technically to section 3 of the Open Source definition. Newer program licensing omits this condition. The FreeOTFE license has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative and is not certified to be labeled with the open-source certification mark.

This software is compatible with Linux encrypted volumes (e.g. LUKS, cryptoloop, dm-crypt), allowing data encrypted under Linux to be read (and written) freely. It was the first open source transparent disk encryption system to support Windows Vista and PDAs.