Tho its second paragraph backs off and notes VeraCrypt is not used to encrypt any portions of such devices or (or in file systems) that utilize a wear-leveling mechanism (and that We recommend that VeraCrypt volumes are not created/stored on devices The first paragraph of this VeraCrypt documentation page ( ) discusses wear leveling drives, and warns: with a stronger password), that is definitely a danger: the old weakly encryped data may still exist for a long time in various physical sectors. On the other had, if you re-encrypt that partition (e.g.

never subsequently change its password/keyfiles(s)) then all subsequent data written to that partition should be OK it does not matter what physical sectors get written to because the data is encrypted. I think that if you encrypt your SSD's partition once (i.e. SSD's wear leveling, which will write data from any partition all over the physical blocks of the SSD, complicates matters. MBR or GPT), and that data is mostly static and mostly useless for an attacker. That is because the sole exposed data is the partion layout (e.g. My guess for a non-SSD is that you lose little security by merely encrypting a partition instead of FDE. So, I am asking if encrypted partitions are similarly vulnerable to information leakage, or have some other kind of vulnerability that FDE would stop.Īnd, would your answer change if the drive is an SSD? An SSD will surely have wear leveling, so data is actually written throughout the drive's physical sectors (see: ). Citations: this VeraCrypt documentation page and Palancar's first response in this discussion. For example, a VeraCrypt encrypted file container volume on an unencrypted drive with an NTFS file system will, at a minimum, leak meta data. My concern arises because using an encrypted file container for a volume can be problematic. Do I lose security by merely encrypting a partition of a drive instead of doing full drive encryption (FDE)?

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