I’ve kept stumbling again and again on this pesky situation where encryption is the key to keep data as a secret from prying eyes.
Question/Task:
I am new to part of encryption on Ubuntu .
Is there any way to encrypt files and folder with password from terminal ? without using truecrypt or cryptkeeper?
Answer:
You can encrypt and decrypt files with gpg
To encrypt a file
gpg -c file.to.encrypt
To decrypt a file
gpg file.to.encrypt.gpg
But gpg will not do entire directories. For entire directories you have several options, ecryptfs is popular.
# Install if ecryptfs-utils if needed
sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils
# Make an encrypted directory
ecryptfs-setup-private
That will make a directory “Private”. Any data you put into the directory Private will automatically be encrypted when you log out and decrypted when you log in.
If you want a different behavior or a different directory …
mkdir ~/secret
chmod 700 ~/secret
sudo mount -t ecryptfs ~your_user/secret ~your_user/secret
Put your data into ~/secrte
To encrypt
sudo umount ~your_user/secret
To Decrypt
sudo mount ./secret ./secret -o key=passphrase,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=16,ecryptfs_passthrough=no,ecryptfs_enable_filename_crypto=yes
Hint: make an alias for that second command.
Geeking around is fun after all…