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Deep Thoughts by Robert Felty

thoughts on wordpress, latex, cooking et alia
September 19th, 2007

cross-platform file encryption

Recall from a previous post that I was playing around with Filevault on Mac OSX not too long ago, which encrypts your home folder on the fly. I ultimately decided that it was not worth it, since it messed up a few programs, and most of my data is not very sensitive. However, I do have some sensitive data, like bank statements and such, that I keep on my computer. And now that I am mostly using linux, but still using Mac some, I have decided that using an encrypted .sparseimage file is not so cool anymore. Today I researched for some alternatives, and it seems like ccrypt is the solution that works best for me. It is available for Mac, most all *nix flavors, and Windows. It also uses very strong AES encryption. I like to keep a whole directory in some sort of encrypted archive, which I can then decrypt when I want to. To do this with my bank statements, I would encrypt it like so:

tar -cvz statements | ccencrypt -K password -H password > statements.tar.gz.cpt
rm -fR statements

Then when I want to decrypt it, I only have to do:

cat statements.tar.gz.cpt | ccdecrypt -K password | tar -xvz

3 Responses to “cross-platform file encryption”

  1. On December 3rd, 2007 at 10:08 pm
    Andrew wrote:

    Wouldn’t this leave the directory super-easy to recover? Could you instead use shred to write random data over it?

  2. On January 3rd, 2009 at 10:27 am
    Folde encryption software wrote:

    Hi,
    Thanks for the nice post. I like it keep it up.
    I find the Proper information in this post.

    Cheers

  3. On March 11th, 2009 at 10:51 am
    babykläder wrote:

    thanks for sharing your knowledge. I appariciate for your effort. I got useful info through this blog.
    Thanks

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