Le Roux posted as “X”

The smoking gun connecting the 2002 p2p currency posts to Le Roux is that Le Roux posted as “X” a year later in relation to TrueCrypt. That Le Roux loved to play games with his own name is evident in his Rx Limited pharmacy business and the use of Rx (Roux) in hundreds of website domain names. X, the last letter of his name, was a natural pseudonym for him to use.

TrueCrypt was the evolution of Le Roux’s E4M. It was announced on 2 Feb 2004 by a mysterious “TrueCrypt Team” and withdrawn the next day after protests from Le Roux’s former boss at SecurStar, Wilfred Hafner. Remarkably, Hafner claimed to have the rights over E4M which was released as open source software in 1998. The Satoshi Enigma shows why Hafner’s astonishing claim is most likely true.

Le Roux has always denied that he wrote TrueCrypt. Like much of what le Roux has said this is correct—but only up to a point. The book shows that Le Roux had the idea for what became TrueCrypt after leaving SecurStar. He began to develop the product in early 2003, but handed it over to others to complete because of his commitment the on-line pill marketing business and his reproachment with Hafner.

This is the background to Le Roux’s posts to the scramdisk Usenet group starting the day after the launch of TrueCrypt. He could not appear to be connected with TrueCrypt because of the legal dispute. So he participated under two aliases, “Entropy” and “X”. Both Entropy and X only posted in connection with TrueCrypt. They both demonstrated expert knowledge of TrueCrypt and E4M. And analysis of their posts shows they are the same individual—one will often take up and finish an argument started by the other.

More than one person thought that Entropy was the main developer of TrueCrypt although he denied this. But he was clearly a member of the TrueCrypt team. Development of TrueCrypt had apparently stopped due to Hafner’s legal action although the software was still available through “unofficial” sources. Some users were concerned by this situation, but Entropy assured them that the pause was only temporary:

“Actually I am quite sure that the development *will* continue soon. ;-)” (15 May 2004)

He was proved correct when TrueCrypt 2.0 was announced two weeks later. Entropy gives one hint about his location: he resided in a European country which was not the UK. At this time Le Roux still lived in the Netherlands.

As for X, we can tell he is Le Roux. X always defends Le Roux and knows a great deal about him. He knows things that realistically only Le Roux himself would know. For example, he berates computer scientist Peter Gutmann for not reviewing E4M in 1998, including its adoption of Gutmann’s own methodology. How could anyone other than Le Roux know this?

In another thread, X gets into an argument with Shaun Hollingworth who Le Roux worked with at SecurStar. The two were always rivals and were now bitter competitors. X maintained that Le Roux removed support for Hollingworth’s scramdisk product from E4M due to specific deficiencies in scramdisk. He maintained this against Hollingworth’s strong protests and corrected Hollingworth’s own understanding of events. Only Le Roux would have taken such a vehement part in this obscure argument about something that had happened years previously. X is Le Roux.