Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Howto: Encrypt your private files with Encfs & Cryptkeeper Gnome applet



I have been using this little applet called cryptkeeper with encfs for a while now, it is a beautifully simple power user application that will help you keep your private information safe and secure.
Basically Cryptkeeper is a Linux system tray applet that manages EncFS encrypted folders. In this simple Howto, I will assist you in installing encfs and CryptKeeper.

1. Install encfs like this:
sudo apt-get install encfs
sudo echo fuse >> /etc/modules
sudo modprobe fuse
sudo addgroup fuse
2. Then you must log off and back on again.
To do this quickly just press ctrl+alt+backspace and log back in.
Then Download & Install Cryptkeeper via Getdeb.net here
or wget http://www.getdeb.net/download.php?release=1177&fpos=0
Then click Applications->system tools->Cryptkeeper or alt F2 type in Cryptkeeper.

I personally like cryptkeeper to Autostart, if you want to do this press alt+F2 type/paste gnome-session-properties and add "cryptkeeper" without the quotes to start it up automatically
-- I personally am the administrator where I use this so I like to run cryptkeeper as root via gksudo as an added form of protection, you decide.

Resources:
Cryptkeeper Developer Tom
EncFS Wikipedia
EncFS Developer Site
at

8 comments:

  1. EmbeeSeptember 8, 2007 at 5:29 AM

    Upon attempting to install the deb package for CryptKeeper, I met several unmet dependencies. I'm running Edgy at the moment. Is this incompatible with Edgy ? Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. defconSeptember 8, 2007 at 8:51 AM

    To build from source you will need:

    * libgtk+ >= 2.8
    * gconf 2.0
    * encfs and fuse (I used fuse 2.6.3)

    ReplyDelete
  3. defconSeptember 8, 2007 at 8:52 AM

    http://www.tomatarium.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/cryptkeeper/cryptkeeper-0.9.0.tar.gz

    ReplyDelete
  4. DarkerNightsSeptember 30, 2007 at 1:06 PM

    Ok well I got this up and running. Works really well, I just have one problem.

    Anyone why might hop on my lappy (friends) might want to play around and I noticed that If you right click on one of the stashes you can delete them without any type of authentication. Is there a way to password protect this?

    ReplyDelete
  5. defconSeptember 30, 2007 at 3:30 PM

    well what you could do is establish new user accounts for your friends, and make the permissions private for the files in the stash folder so your friends cannot access them

    ReplyDelete
  6. DarkerNightsOctober 2, 2007 at 10:01 PM

    so there's no way to just make it prompt for a password whenever I want to delete the stash?

    That is a good idea, just that I don't want them on it at all, but if they want to look something up really quick I just want to make sure everything else is secure... or I could just not let them on it at all. hehe

    ReplyDelete
  7. defconOctober 3, 2007 at 5:21 AM

    are you referring to the .encfs_dir or the mounted encfs folder?

    If the user has it mounted they can rm files, as well as they can delete the (@(*&3knhABLKASDJh etc files in the .encfs folder; I wrote another article on truecrypt which may be more effective, the user can mount there own virtual filedrive that can be hiddin as an avi/mp3:
    http://ubuntu-unleashed.blogspot.com/2007/09/encrypt-your-files-with-truecrypt.html

    ReplyDelete
  8. DarkerNightsOctober 4, 2007 at 9:00 PM

    oh cool! Truecyrpt. used it on windows and I didn't know they had it for Linux. Thanks, I'll have to look into that.

    ReplyDelete