We are thinking of using ccrypt in our company to encrypt our data. Is ccrypt still a strong encryption that is very hard to break?
Yes, it is. Ccrypt uses strong 256-bit encryption which is currently considered to be unbreakable. Technically speaking, ccrypt uses the Rijndael block cipher. Rijndael was also chosen for the “Advanced Encryption Standard” (AES) by the U.S. government (see http://www.nist.gov/aes/). However, there is one difference between ccrypt and AES: ccrypt uses the 256-bit block size allowed by the Rijndael cipher, whereas the AES standard currently only covers the 128-bit block size. This does not mean that ccrypt is less secure than AES, only that it is not technically covered by the AES standard. Thus, it would be wrong to say that ccrypt is an “AES” encryption tool. Nevertheless, the cipher used by ccrypt is under much public scrutiny and, supposing that it were ever broken, this would be widely publicized immediately. As of this writing, this cipher has not been broken, and the experts think that it will be good for at least several decades.
