mounting a truecrypt file across network

Question

If I have a truecrypt file on a shared drive, if I mount it by using the shared path does my password data get sent in plain text across the network? Basically my question: is it safe to mount a truecrypt file across a network without copying the file to your local machine first.

Answer 1

Your password data is not sent across the network, because the cryptographic operations takes place on your computer, in the TrueCrypt driver. The password is used to derive a key that is used on your computer to decrypt the encrypted sectors sent across the network.

TrueCrypt FAQ has a section on this. I beleive item 2 is what you want to acheive. Their warning is that someone looking at the encrypted trafic could get some side-channel information, like the amount of data read and written, and the offset in the encrypted file.

Unless you want protection from your government or other well funded attacker, I beleive you should be ok, password wise. You might test what happens when a network failur occurs while writing a large file. It might corrupt the file system you mounted.

Answer 2

What I did:

1. mounted the TrueCrypt Drive and a TrueCrypt-Container with VeraCrypt (is newer)
2. created a windows (samba) and mac (afp) share of the drive and container with a password in the share settings (whatever software you use)

Mounting the container prevented it from being overwritten from some one else opening the container directly.