The business of creating bulletproof encryption software is a tough business.  Plenty of people thought they had found that perfect data security formula only to have their dreams dashed by other people looking to do the same.  As a result, there are only a handful of encryption algorithms out there in the world that are considered to "just work," such as RSA or AES.

So, if you're looking for the best hard drive encryption software program, I'm afraid you are stuck with old technology.  Ironically enough, encryption is probably the only field where, the older the technology is, the better it is--because it means it's that much more secure.  (Otherwise, that encryption process wouldn't be here today.  Who was to protect data with encryption known not to work?)

The key to choosing the best hard drive encryption, then, is not to find the best, but to forego the worst.  I'll repeat that: avoid the worst type of encryption and your data will be safer.

So how do you avoid the worst?  Well, generally speaking, in-house or proprietary encryption algorithms that haven't been scoured by the eyes of the security community tends to be the worst.  Such encryption tends to rely, not on the strength of the encryption, but on obfuscation.  In other words, ultimately, security relies on hiding any defects associated with the encryption formula.  As long as that defect is not found, the data is protected.

But, when (if?) the bad guys find that defect, they're not going to go around announcing it, so you'll continue to "protect" your data using the now-worthless encryption program.

On the other hand, the methods on how RSA and AES protect your data are open secrets.  The security community has had time (ample time, in the case of RSA.  It's been around since the 1970's) to consider the background theory powering the encryption as well as testing it out, and these have stood up to the test of time.  If you're really interested, you can look up the theories on Wikipedia.

Now, this doesn't mean that these algorithms are without their shortcomings.  However, these shortcomings are easy to counter.  For example, with RSA, their biggest problem is the fact that data has to be re-encrypted with a longer key length from time to time (we're talking years here).  The reason?  Computer power increases exponentially.

All encryption algorithms, and software that uses them, such as AlertBoot endpoint data security, are bound to be defeated sooner or later by something called a brute-force attack: trying an infinite number of keys to figure out which one works will some day yield access to your protected data.  That's the bad news.

The good news?  Right now, with all the computing power in the world combined, it would take at least a century to even realistically approach a 15% chance of randomly finding, and hence breaking, RSA or AES is considered pretty much impossible.