What's new in Personal Data Security (PDS2) 2.3.1
Jan 11, 2018
- Bug Fixes:
- In one scenario of appending the time and time zone to encrypted files and directories, time stamps were not being added as expected.
- Improvements :
- Additional dialogs to relay information.
- Additional CLI information displayed via the "showcrypto" argument.
- Updates to the QuickStart.
New in Personal Data Security (PDS2) 2.3 (Jan 11, 2018)
- Improvements:
- Minor changes to licensing and a few other dialogs.
New in Personal Data Security (PDS2) 2.2.2 (Jan 11, 2018)
- Improvements:
- Check for active encryption/decryption jobs when closing PDS. Display jobs and confirm the close request if any jobs are found. The check is performed before the existing confirmation that the contents of all Notes has been saved to persistent storage.
- Prevent multiple instances of the QuickStart dialog.
- Changed the default settings for password generator.
- Enable all options by default.
- Added the option "Always prompt to exit?"
- Display Linux/Unix instead of just Linux in selected dialogs.
- Add Java "os.name" to selected dialogs.
New in Personal Data Security (PDS2) 2.2.1 (Jan 11, 2018)
- Improvements:
- Very minor updates and bug fixes for modality, dialogs, and the default settings.
New in Personal Data Security (PDS2) 2.2 (Jan 11, 2018)
- Improvements:
- Improved modality for better interaction among the PDS components.
- Progress Monitor DialogsMac only. Various issues have been observed when Progress Monitor Dialogs were enabled. These issues include instances of out of sync progress indicators as well as unexpected behavior when selecting the Cancel. button. This release applies a consistent workaround in the Cancel operation, and with that the Cancel operation now appears to function as expected.
- Changes to Accelerator Keys. Keys D, F, G and H are now encryption (Directory and File) and decryption (File and Directory), respectively.
New in Personal Data Security (PDS2) 2.1 (Jan 11, 2018)
- Improvement:
- Moved the assignment of the Mac Look and Feel from an external configuration parameter to an internal component of the PDS app. By doing this, Mac users who do not wish to install Java 6 from Apple will still be able to run PDS with the Mac Look and Feel - by executing the JAR file directly. A side effect of starting PDS in this manner is that the PDS images that are specific to Mac will display as Java or Apple images.
New in Personal Data Security (PDS2) 2.1 (Jan 11, 2018)
- New Features:
- The option to add configurable time stamps to encrypted PDS Files and Directories during the encryption process. Time stamps may include the date, time, time zone, or any combination of the three. For encrypted PDS Directories there is also the option of adding a time stamp to the name of the PDS encrypted Directory without adding it to the contents of the encrypted Directory.
- A configurable password generator that will use a small set of characters (A-Z, a-z and 0-9) or a much larger set of characters. The number of characters in the password is configurable. There is also an option to copy the newly generated password to the system clipboard.
- The ability to clear the contents of the system clipboard.
- Improved modality among the PDS Dialogs, to better facilitate interaction between different components within the application.
- A free (as in beer) release.
New in Personal Data Security (PDS2) 2.0 (Jan 11, 2018)
- Security:
- Generation of Secret Keys is improved: Replaced the KeyGenerator class with the SecretKeyFactory class. PDS uses SecureRandom to generate a 64-bit salt that is fed into PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1 to hash the Secret Keys' passphrase 65536 times.
- Initialization Vector: Replaced the static Initialization Vector (IV) with a unique IV (generated by SecureRandom) for every file. Each unique IV is contained within the metadata of the PDS file.
- Resolved edge cases where the Key and/or KeyStore passphrases were not being scrubbed from memory after use. Added debugging of the scrubbing passphrases into the application. To enable and observe, please see the "Improvements" section below.
- Restricted the scope of classes and methods.
- New Features:
- Added more decryption options (e.g. verification only).
- Added support for both Plain and Styled Documents.
- Added the ability to import plain text files into PDS Notes. To import a file, select the "File->Encrypt->File" option within PDS and select Base64 encoding; the result will be a PDS Note.
- Added the ability to use non-rewinding tape devices to encrypt and decrypt records on magnetic tapes.
- Added new warning dialogs where appropriate. Some can be disabled and re-enabled.
- Added the ability to view and edit encryption Keys. There are two views: Information (Algorithm and Size) and Details.
- Added the ability to display the current Default Key.
- Added settings to manage the optional dialogs within the application.
- Maintaining the backward compatibility with earlier Notes and Files.
- Improvements:
- Better support for Mac
- Implemented Mac look and feel.
- Fine grained control over authentication. In previous releases, some dialogs unnecessarily prompted for both the KeyStore and Key credentials when only one was needed. This release prompts for the minimal amount of credentials required.
- More robust error messages in dialogs.
- Verification of the clearing of authentication credentials. To enable, set: showzero=true e.g. $ java -Dshowzero=true -jar /path/to/pds.jar PDS will attempt to clear the credentials as soon as possible, printing the result to the terminal window.
- Verification of the cryptographic functions. To enable, set: showcrypto=true PDS prints selected cryptographic operations to the terminal window.
- PDS uses the universalJavaApplicationStub to start the JVM on Mac. This open-source product provides the much needed support for newer JREs on OS X. Thank you Tobias! For more information, please see: https://github.com/tofi86/universalJavaApplicationStub