Hi,

I've never used crypt or mcrypt, and i need to encrypt a .tar file to later decrypt it again. I would appreciate if someone explained me step by step what i have to do. Im interested in using a maximum security algorithm but im pretty ignorant in this topic


cheers !

try gpg for some serious crypto

look at http://www.gnupg.org

it has the howto's and the downloads if you haven't got them yet.

you could write your own small php encryption program it takes only a second to get symetric encryption to work. Have a look at the mcrypt thing in www.php.net

I've read most googleable tutorials, but when it starts talking about generating symmetric keys and upgrading the kernel for random number generation they lose me

What's hard?
Once a file is encrypted though, don't lose the keys that you used (they're stored in ~/.gnupg) or the data will be forever lost.

Thanks sigsegv for putting it in clear terms. If it would have been so easy to found an example like yours,.. apparently people doesnt feel comfortable with simplicity

I don't feel comfortable with it either. I expect a user to know what they're doing, or at least be able to read/search, which in this case it looks like you have (some). GPG isn't hard software, and the documentation is plentiful, so I really don't know why anyone with basic reading comprehension skills would need help beyond someone telling them GPG is what they're looking for.


Crypto is one of those things ... Just because you know the commands to do something doesn't mean you don't have to know how it works. Not knowing what you're doing and how the software works is an almost definite eventuality of data loss.