On Tuesday 24 July 2007, Brian Hansen wrote: > >uh, if you expect to work with encryption at all, get used to the > > ideas of KEY and PASSPHRASE. search for and read a tutorial on > > encryption and FYI the hand-holding linux folks live somewhere yon, > > past them hills. > > I am not interested in the idea of having to keep some private key > safe. At this > moment I am just looking for the solution provided by Mcrypt, but I > am not able > to determine if GNUpg is a better choise regarding safety.
You already have all the tools you need for simple password based encryption of files. To Encrypt: $ openssl enc -des3 -in filename -out filename.des3 To Decrypt: $ openssl enc -des3 -d -in filename.des3 -out filename Just make sure you remember your password and the cipher you used (des3 in the above example, and hence the unnecessarily descriptive extension ".des3" I used on the encrypted file name). These days most would prefer AES or BlowFish over 3DES. All (common sense) rules for password length/entropy still apply and yes, some (possibly most) consider keys far stronger. See man 8 openssl for more details. Also see the "-P" switch in man rm(1) for deletion of the original, unencrypted file. Lastly, I'm not crypto expert, so do your own research and hope that if I'm wrong in the above, someone around here will be kind enough to beat me with a clue stick. kind regards, JCR
