Cryptsetup is an open source and free command-line, userspace software that allows users to easily setup transparent disk encryption using the dm-crypt Linux kernel module, including plain dm-crypt volumes, loop-AES, TrueCrypt and LUKS volumes.

The software is based ok LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) and offers compatibility via standardization, support for multiple keys, compelling passphrase revocation, and protection against low-entropy attacks.

Cryptsetup also includes a veritysetup tool, which can be used to effortlessly setup dm-verity block integrity checking module for the Linux kernel. Cryptsetup is supported on all Linux operating systems.

A wide range of command-line options are included in the Cryptsetup software, which can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘cryptsetup --help’ command in a terminal emulator app. The usage message is also displayed, which uses a very simple syntax.

Among the most interesting command-line options, we can mention the ability to create a read-only mapping, to set the size of the device, to align payload at a given sector boundaries for luksFormat, to specify the device or file with separated LUKS headers, to disable password quality check, as well as to specify the UUID for device to use.

Installing Cryptsetup on your personal computer running a GNU/Linux distribution is quite easy. All you have to do is to download the source package from either Softpedia or the project’s website, save the archive on your Home directory, and unpack it using an archive manager tool.

Open a terminal emulator, move to the location where you’ve extracted the archive file (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/cryptsetup-1.6.6) and run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program. After a successful compilation, install it system wide by running the ‘sudo make install’ command.