Brief Update - Temporary Inactivity

Hi everyone,

I wanted to take a moment to share a quick update with the community.

At the beginning of this month, I relocated with my family from France to a country outside of Europe due to a combination of personal and professional reasons. While the destination is not a secret to those close to me, I prefer not to share it publicly until everything is fully settled and in place.

This move has naturally taken a significant amount of time and energy and it explains my recent lack of activity and delayed responses to many messages and emails. I understand the importance of staying engaged with the community and I truly appreciate your patience and continued support during this transition period.

I expect to resume normal activity within the next 2 to 3 weeks. In the meantime, thank you for your understanding and for continuing to support the project.

Mounir,
You've amply demonstrated over the years what a brilliant programmer you are, and I'm always amazed at how generously you've divided your time to respond to concerns in the VeraCrypt community, especially when operating systems are such a moving target for the required tight integration. I've dreaded the relocation process every time when it was just across town, with only a small fraction of the complexity of moving to a new continent. I wish you and your family all the best in your new home country!!!

Hello everyone,

I want to sincerely thank you for your patience, understanding and kind messages, both those received privately and, of course, the thoughtful post from @garymarks.

I’m happy to now share that my family and I have settled in Japan, specifically in the city of Kobe. This move marks an important new chapter for us, both personally and professionally. To clarify and hopefully put an end to any speculation: my wife is Japanese and we’ve been married for over a decade. She has been a strong and continuous source of support since the very beginning of VeraCrypt and our decision to relocate was made together, with our family’s well-being in mind.

With this transition, I’ve also launched a new business in Japan under the name AMCrypto (https://amcrypto.jp). While IDRIX will continue to operate in a minimal capacity in France, my primary activities will now be conducted from Japan through AMCrypto. As part of this evolution, you may notice some changes to website links and resources. For example, https://veracrypt.jp is already live. While it currently mirrors the existing site, it will gradually become the main hub for VeraCrypt going forward.

I want to reassure everyone that my commitment to VeraCrypt and its community remains as strong as ever. Development and support will continue, and I’m excited about the opportunities this new environment brings.

Thank you again for your ongoing support, patience, and understanding. I look forward to resuming normal activity and continuing to work together to make VeraCrypt even better.

We're relieved to hear that the canary has landed and is building a new nest in a safe and friendly environment!

Moving to JP is wonderful news. Love that country, people and culture. You feel so safe, and its so efficient.

Hello Mounir,

Thanks a lot for keeping us informed.

I guess that this move to this new country represents a big change for you and your family and a new milestone in your personal and professional lives!

Thanks again for your commitment in maintaining and developing VeraCrypt project.

Cheers,
Patriccollu.

Thanks for the update! I was wondering why veracrypt.eu website wasn't working... so I came and looked here.

url
www.veracrypt.fr display empty page !!!!
replace it by
www.veracrypt.io

I have migrated veracrypt.fr to a different hosting and things were not smooth. Now things seem to be solved.

Indeed, my plan was to make veracrypt.fr redirect all its pages to there veracrypt.io equivalent. As indicated this commit (https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/code/ci/c87a66b85d79da15d1389e1b5487058164ffd9db/), main website is veracrypt.jp and veracrypt.io is its mirror. Because of latency, the .io mirror is better for European users.

On the development side, I have worked on some cryptographic enhancements. Argon2id is finally coming as a more modern and stronger alternative to PBKDF2. I also worked on integrating Chinese SM4 cipher, but I dropped it at the end because of low security compared to others.

There are some design choices to be made for Argon2id. I will create a separate thread to request feedback.

@idrassi Good luck with your new endeavour!!
Hopefully you'll have some time to add new encryption methods to VeraCrypt at some stage ;-)
For example, Adiantum / ChaCha12.

@idrassi

When will the first version of VeraCrypt with the new Argon2id be released?

@selectline: The code logic is done, only UI part is missing. I had to switch to other tasks and so I didn't publish a test version yet. I will try tomorrow to implement a quick UI for it and share it for feedback, specially around user experience.

PS: I have been studying lately latest research on wide block cipher and in this context, I have designed a block cipher named "Charybdis " with a 512-bit block size that tries to combine latest ideas in a different design to achieve conservative security with acceptable performance. I published it at https://github.com/idrassi/Charybdis.
Of course, this is a research project, so it is not finalized. Such activities are important to stay connected with advances on cryptography to achieve best security possible in real world.

I haven't logged in here in years but I wanted to do so just to congratulate you Mounir on your move, and to thank you for your dedication and continued support for this project.