The Strange Origins of TrueCrypt, ISIS’s Favored Encryption Tool

On Tuesday, the Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi published the latest in a series of blockbuster stories about the inner workings of the Islamic State. The piece focussed on the logistics of the group’s deployment of terrorists in Europe, but also included a significant revelation in an ongoing debate about encryption. In ISIS’s training and operational planning, Callimachi reported, the group appeared to routinely use a piece of software called TrueCrypt. When one would-be bomber was dispatched from Syria to France, Callimachi writes, “an Islamic State computer specialist handed him a USB key. It contained CCleaner, a program used to erase a user’s online history on a given computer, as well as TrueCrypt, an encryption program that was widely available at the time and that experts say has not yet been cracked.”