Hi all

Is there any nice app in Linux by which I can encrypt files & folders WITHOUT using keys? I find this key system of KGpg quite compilcated & incomprehensible.
And I think KGpg can only use keys to encrypt right?
How do I encrypt things simply with a password? Is this possible with any of the default apps of Gnome/KDE/Terminal?

Plz help.

Love
Newbie

gpg -c file_to_encrypt

This is a symetric encryption with gpg. You don't need to take the key or something else with you when you want to decrypt. You only need to know the passphrase

You might also want to check out ccrypt (http://ccrypt.sourceforge.net/). It uses AES encryption and runs on a number of platforms (including Linux, BSD, AIX, Windows, etc.). Although it doesn't encrypt a directory as is, there is the -r option, which recurses through directories. There is also KDE integration (although I haven't tried this out) available: http://www.comnet.be/files/ccrypt/Readme.html

Just an important comment if you plan on using it:

"Ccrypt uses very little memory and disk space, because by default, it overwrites files in place. Since it encrypts data a few bytes at a time, it does not need to read the entire file into memory. For this reason, it uses no additional disk space, very little memory, and does not write temporary data to disk.

However, if you use the --tmpfiles option, then ccrypt will use a temporary file rather than overwriting the original file in place. In this case, you need enough free disk space to hold the largest file you are encrypting." (http://ccrypt.sourceforge.net/faq.html#max)

I would like to point out that there is no encryption without keys--that is, if we take `key' to mean the broader `secret part'. In this sense, the password is the key, and the only difference is that you store in your memory (/brain) instead of on the disk.

Most likely, though, the password isn't the key, but the key is generated *from* the password--and the disk-stored keys are encrypted with a symmetric cipher.

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